Dev Blog - Upcoming updates and keeping the deadlines

Hello Everyone,

First, we would like to thank all of you for all the support we received over the course of last month. We mean not only the financial support on Kickstarter and Patreon but also all the help you’ve given us promoting Bloodcrave, giving us feedback, and spreading the news. It’s heartwarming to see so many people care so deeply about Bloodcrave. Once again, thank you for that.

The second thing we would like to address is missing deadlines with updates. We know that we have been consistently missing them in the last few months, and it’s something we want to focus on fixing now. We’ll include a longer breakdown at the end of this update, but here are steps we’ll take to keep the deadlines from now on:

• A new writer will join the team in April.

• We’ll set deadlines with more buffer in case something unexpected happens.

• The past haphazard updates caused a lot of trouble. We cleaned most of the mess, so working on future updates will be easier.

• To be more transparent, we’ll post the goals for each update and summarize the results when releasing it.

• We’re finalizing Kickstarter so we can focus more on development and less on business and marketing.

So, what are the next updates?

On Wednesday, we’ll release a beta version of the main story update. It’ll include all the scenes from partial updates properly scripted into the main game. It’ll also add story updates, including the 3rd Twins Interrogation, the route where the Twins are dead, and scenes where the team is closing in on Nova.

It’ll be a beta update, so a few things might still be rough on the edges here and there – some scenes might need more illustration variants or sound design to be more immersive, and there might be some minor choices unavailable yet.

We aim to address all those issues in the full update a week later. It’ll fix all missing minor choices and add more illustration variants and sound design. The most significant change will be adding Oliver’s dinner scene (in the beta update, there will be a placeholder for it). It’ll probably also add some minor scenes/texting, but only if we finish everything in time.

After we publish the full update, we’ll publish a detailed roadmap for April and a rough roadmap for upcoming months. We’ll also do a survey to see what you like and what you didn’t like. There will be also a new poll about the next extra scene.

Deep dive into mistakes in the past and upcoming development changes

A new way of handling deadlines.

It’s not a secret that our team is stretched thin, especially in the writing and scripting department, which is mainly on our lead designer’s head, who is also responsible for running the business and marketing. So whenever an unexpected issue arises regarding business or promotion, it takes his time away from writing. We should have been planning things better and setting deadlines with more wiggle room in case something unexpected happened; however, we had this silly idea that if we set tight deadlines, we’ll work harder to meet them, and it’ll make us deliver updates to you faster. Of course, in hindsight, we realize that it was really dumb and that we need to change things. From now on, we’ll be setting more realistic deadlines, and our goal is to meet 100% release dates going forward.

Cleaning up the mess we made in the past.

One of the results of our dumb approach to deadlines was that many scenes and features we added last year were implemented haphazardly, with scenes missing routes, buggy features, and poorly written/edited scenes. This created development debt – it made us release updates faster in the past, but it also cost us time to fix all those issues later. Now that Bloodcrave has turned into a full-time project starting this year, we decided to fix all those past haphazard scenes, and only then did we realize how bad it was. For example, we thought we just needed to add a couple of variants to the broken AC scene, but then we read again how the current variants were written, with poor grammar, style, and plot holes, we realized we have a lot more fixing to do, we had to edit a lot of scenes again. Now, that job is almost done. We edited all the scenes* and added nearly all missing decisions, with only a few small ones left to implement. Now that we won’t have to focus our efforts on fixing past mistakes, we’ll be able to focus 100% of our efforts on new content.

Less business, more development.

Another thing that hindered work was working on securing funds. Preparing Kickstarter, business talks, and marketing took way more of our time than we expected. Now that Kickstarter has been successful and we have secured more funds for development, we can focus on the game instead.

Growing the team.

However, even with all the time we freed up, we don’t think that we can currently write enough scenes to match the speed with which our artists create illustrations. We optimized the pipeline in recent months, and it turned out to be a little better than expected. Now, we’re sitting on a treasure trove of unreleased art that keeps growing because we can’t keep up with writing new scenes. To address this, we decided to hire a new writer who will join the team in April. It’ll take time to onboard them, so initially, the output won’t improve much, but after a couple of months, it should make a big difference in the number of scenes we can release each month.

Tracking progress.

Lastly, to make things more transparent, from now on, we’ll post our plans at the beginning of every month, and when we release an update, we’ll summarize how much we managed to do from our original plan. Over time, it should help us better understand the workload we can handle. And for you, it’ll be easier to track your progress.

*By editing, we mean the first editing run. Our professional editor, Ryechu, is also editing the final script, but he is usually a couple of months behind.