[Progress Report]: 3rd of May

Hey everyone,

So, all of my development time this week has been dedicated to cranking out the first patrol. I decided to go for one large event instead of breaking it up into two smaller ones. Progress on it has taken longer than I wanted, but I was trying out a few different lighting methods to improve the quality of the renders. You can see the early results of this in the above image. The shadows are a bit darker, and the scene has better contrast compared to earlier "in-car" renders. What do you all think? Is this worth the longer render time or should I go back to the original quality and focus on just making more content? I'm always struggling with "quantity versus quality" when I render, so it would be good to hear from you all.

Once the first patrol is done, I'm going to be working on the lecture "hint" system and hopefully one more event before release. I'm still pulling overtime at my hospital job, so it's more up in the air than I would like. Right now, though, since version 0.40 is almost done, I would like to touch briefly on what comes afterward.

I've received sort of an explosion of feedback in the past few weeks which have pointed out many justifiable flaws with the game. I have tried my best to make save-game compatibility between versions a priority, which is why even if you didn't start a new game to see the new introduction in the last update, you could still continue your original save file. As someone who can see all the routes and knows exactly how the variables work, I have lost sight on how difficult it might be for people trying out the game for the first time to navigate. The start was always supposed to be "slow," but I'm afraid that instead I've made the start "irritating" instead.

My plan for version 0.45 is to go back and flesh out the earlier portions of the Academy, add new events, implement a better hint system, improve some aspects of the UI, and in general fix up parts of the game that have been lagging behind. Likely, future updates to Superheroes Suck will work like this, with every other edition focusing on content other than the main story. This would also be a good time for me to touch up some of the older renders, add compression to a few files I accidentally left as .pngs, and probably most important to you all: redo the old "animations" to actually be animations. 

There will still be new story content in these alternating updates, I'll just have a bigger focus on the "side content" of the game. This way, when it comes to a "mainline" update, I can focus entirely on the main story. As always, let me know what you think, and I greatly appreciate your feedback.

~Solace