[Progress Report]: 2nd of February

Hey, everyone

Once again, no images for this post because my mind is a block of text and you all need to feel my pain.

So, last update focused entirely on improving the game's navigation and menus. I'm happy to report that the reception has been unanimously positive. I don't think I've seen a single person say they preferred the old system, which is a relief and a balm to my soul. It was a very difficult process involving at least one manic episode as I realized the chat bubbles would be almost useless without the floor indicators in the final two weeks of development for that cycle. Those of you in the discord, you can recall my strange stream of consciousness rambling.

Implementing the floor indicators was the right call, and I stand by that decision. The downside was that it forced the completion of the game's wiki, my personal wiki, to... roughly yesterday.

In order to make sure the game worked with such a large overall, I did two playthroughs. One was to speed through the game to fix any progress blockers, glaring audio issues, and strange scene transitions in order to deliver it on time and with minimal bugs.

I then started a second playthrough in order to take detailed notes on the story, weak points, correct dialogue, add music, add sound effects, improve consistency, fix a few renders, update a few point so the menus, and create a large wiki for my game to improve the speed of story creation. I expected this whole process to take around four days. I underestimated how long the game had gotten, which is why it took two weeks. And, after all that...

Story's kind of fire, no? I have been paranoid for at least two years that my early writing did not hold up, forgetting that I revised the early portion already once before and the writing is largely... good? It's fine. There are a handful of bad events that need to be pulled completely, around 12, and then a handful of new events that need to be created to fill gasp, around 10, but after that... the flow should be smooth enough.

The game is in a much better state than I thought, especially now that the navigation is improved.

The upcoming Version updates will see old events pulled out, new events pushed in, and new story content added. Once all of the old events are removed, I will submit the game for Steam certification.

You can expect an update to the Discord's roadmap once this current update is done. I have begun work on Valentina's next event and we should be pushing toward the main story very soon.

All right, that's it from me! It feels good to be story boarding again and I want to render tonight.

Thank you for all of your support,

~Solace