Chapter Sixteen (0.16.0) Update #1

Okay, if you played Chapter 15 to completion, you probably have an idea of what's going to go down in Part 2's final episode. Think of it as the end of the second season. So, if you want to skip out on most of the spoiler talk, skip past the paragraphs after the progress tracker image and go straight to the bold heading titled "Announcement about scheduling" at the bottom for some development-related news.

I'm gonna go ahead and just state that Chapter 16 is packed, content-wise. Not including the four unlockable alt-scenes (which open up at the end of the episode), just about every sequence is long. In the first third of this chapter, there isn't a scene that's just some simple transition filled with day-to-day conversations. In fact, I don't think the story slows enough to breathe until about scene five. And that's just a pit stop until the next stretch.

Outside of the first few sequences, Chapter 16 is going to feature a lot of new locations. And even the school sets you see get a bit of a shake up as Jack and the girls have to make their hasty retreat. I like to think of this as the table flip of chapters.

While I have no choice but to drop some spoilery images over the next few updates, there are definitely some moments I'm gonna keep under wraps until after the chapter's release. There's "what you know," "what you kinda guessed might happen," and "well, that just happened" in terms of spoilers here. 

Announcement about scheduling

Before the development of Now & Then began I was working from home 100% of the time, which gave me a lot of downtime that I could use to knock out bits and pieces of the game (script, image processing, animation rendering/conversion). Unfortunately, it appears that my time as only a telecommuter is possibly coming to an end. With vaccinations on the rise in my area and most businesses chomping at the bit to get back to the way things used to be, it looks like I'll required to go back to the office. 

What does this mean? Work on Now & Then will continue. But, the schedule of knocking out an episode every month looks decreasingly unlikely. Let's be honest, though: this was an unsustainable pace. The next project (currently in planning stages) was going to have a more traditional release schedule. For right now, I'm hoping that this will only add days/a week or two to the development cycle. I've picked up enough tricks over the past year that most of what I do is pretty streamlined. We'll see how it all plays out. 

But if this is a non-starter for you as a patron, I understand. I wanted to let you know now before it becomes a sure thing, so that you would be informed and prepared for when it does happen. 

Thanks for your support and your interest,

- Kinderfeld