DEVlog #13

Hey Everyone!
Mrs. MegaloDEV here!

Yup, you read that right! >:) The ol' Mr. is busy planning out the retooling of the current prologue for what will be version 0.1 alongside the next draft of the combat. He was planning on writing this DEVlog at the start of the month, but well here we are! I took it upon myself to pick it up the accursed blog number thirteen. Hah!

Recent Polls

We had a couple of recent polls. One for deciding the next character design and a quick one on the updated Golden Barrel map. Seems the consensus was pretty clear on the map with the vast majority of you liking the direction for the placeholder maps. Lorraine's sister will be joining our cast of NPC townsfolk as the owner of the potion shop directly adjacent to Lorraine's Magic Shop! I hear she is a bit of wild one! And for those that voted for Hilda's husband, don't worry he will be designed afterwords!

Art

I hope supporters enjoyed 0.0.12's new H-CG. I really liked how this one turned out in particular! And for everyone else, have no fear as the public release is in just a few days on the 14th!

As for current works, N__u___t is finishing up the next CG for an already existing non-cg scene. We are going to go a bit wholesome on this one! After that we will move on to doing a lewd CG. These will both be necessary for our lead up to 0.1!

[Note: We post art WIP's fairly consistently on our discord, including sketches!]

Writing

This is an area I'd personally like to spend more time on but unfortunately I've been pushed into a more editorial role due to the strain of finishing up my second graduate degree while still working full-time! 

Otherwise his plan for the reworked intro sequence sounds amazing and I can't wait for everyone to experience it! It'll do a much better job at on-boarding new players to the world without too much forced info-dumping.

And don't worry we haven't forgotten to progress the main story too! Ideally we'll have you all right up to "The Party" with 0.1!

State of Funding

We had a pretty good month in Feb although sustained growth has stagnated. But we technically hit the goal with $780 earned last month overall. I genuinely mean this, thanks so much for all the support everyone! Thanks to that we are anticipating adding more art into the pipeline and we can continue to do more complex scene's like 0.0.12's CG. If you need to cancel or temporarily suspend support for whatever reason, there is no need to apologize. Whether you were dealt a difficult hand or you just want to support other awesome creators we thank you for the support regardless! Life can be hard and you have to take care of yourself first and foremost. 

Release Schedule

This is sort of good news here. Mr. MegaloDEV had a major client at his day job abruptly shut down their business so uh... he'll have more time to work on the game! Rather than find a replacement, he just wants to put more time into the game. A little scary income-wise but hey... sometimes you have to take risks.

The result of this is we think it'll be possible to output mid-month preview builds. Currently we release a patch of whatever content we have at the end of the month for supporters and then 2 weeks later for the public. With some hotfixes and minor patches in between.

I think what we will move to this format starting April with a mid-month preview build for Snorkelers and the "final" version still releasing at the end of the month. We'll do it this month and see how it goes. So you can expect 0.0.14 PR1 right around when 0.0.13 goes public on April 11th.

Adding Tier Value

We also want to add some more value to each of the supporter tiers to coincide with Snorkelers getting access to the mid-month "Preview" build. We will try to keep rewards to things that don't drastically take time away from direct development. We'll have more to say about this next week with a separate post. So stay tuned for that!

Stay awesome! :3

PS: What do you think of the banner image for this post? Something to keep doing and improve?