Build Status Update - December Release

Hello everyone, hope everything is going well with you!

As December has arrived, we would like to give you an update on our situation regarding the next build release.

Regarding the writing, we have began work on Day 10, but we have encountered a few issues along the way. We are nearing the end of Act 1, thus a lot of plot points converge here, some finding their resolution, others tying up together and unveiling new ones, and some simply thicken. The problem is, as we were looking into previous days, we realized we really needed to flesh out some characters first, as well as review some lore in the way it is told.

It is no surprise that we have been looking at Day 5 plenty of times, having already reworked it once recently, and we still saw the need to overhaul a few things in there: the magazines and documents the player and Azorin find. Baku has been working on this, also editing lore entries and follow-up dialogues. In Day 9 or 10, you are supposed to be able to speak to Azorin once more and discuss recent developments, so we need to make sure our detective has actually enough leads to reach his own conclusions of what is going on with the resort. Then, once you are brainstorming with him, the flashbacks to previous scenes will make more sense and help build a connected thread.

On another hand, we have Day 7, currently the shortest day in the game. It is an important day! Yarin meets with Morias once more and learns of the existence of some strange ruins, the ones he decides to prepare an expedition for with Cedrik and Lucra. Then, right after and taking the whole afternoon and evening, we have an argument with Brym. While all of this is important, these are relatively short scenes that should not take the amount of time they do, leaving an entire day for us to expand upon. You probably guessed which character really needs further development: It is Kovle. Being one of the main romance routes and an actually very important character, he sees very little screen time in the main course of events. So, here we are, going back in time, to give Kovle what he desperately needs, to be involved in the main plot. We have plans to reserve the whole afternoon of Day 7 for him, which will then connect to his presence in Day 10. Additionally, Kovle is seeing several edits in his previous dates to ensure he is a more grounded character.

To summarize, we are taking some steps to ensure the new content is well connected by reviewing older content and expanding upon it, plus giving some less present characters the attention they require. We hope this will improve the quality of the story overall.

Now, we also have ongoing developments in other areas, such as new CGs for Brym and Yarin’s romance scene, and concept arts for an upcoming character related to the new dream sequences that will have an important role in the later stages of this act. We won’t reveal much before he is fully released, but we are fairly confident in his design.

To wrap up this post, we have some additional words regarding the game’s framework and its many systems.

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Baku here (also known as Lone_Wanderer) and I have been working under the hood in order to simplify a lot of the involved game logic.

One of those features involves romance markers, namely sexual interactions. Until now, the way we tracked how a character had sex with you was with uniquely named variables for each individual date where it occurred.

It didn't really happen often that the game needed to remember exactly on which day you had sex with which character, but furthermore, this made it awkward to check for whether or not you ever had sex with anybody in the first place.

To help solve this, we now have a unified system that tracks how many times you've had sex with any character and also in which role (dom or sub) and position (top or bottom). Each is tracked individually with just a few simple and (most importantly!) streamlined commands. This way, we can also add more into it depending on our necessities.

For any programmers among you: I have basically implemented a dictionary that can be expanded on runtime. This also means that the save file will actually be future-proof. Before, if the character didn't exist before we introduced content with them, they couldn’t be tracked. Now, the opposite is true, allowing us to add characters in retroactively without systematic issues.

This will help with our next issue, save files through versions, as our previous sex tracking system was agnostic of the save file version. This also means that, unfortunately, existing save files will become broken yet again in this upcoming version... and likely also on subsequent versions as we keep further developing this system.

Naturally, we will need to eventually commit to writing our own save-file system, as the current default one by Godot 3 causes so many issues with compatibility with future saves, and is mainly the reason that some unforeseen bugs appear despite our attempts at play-testing the game before releases.

Finally, we also have been at the start of implementing a proper inventory system, so you'll be able to look at all those lore pieces and magazines again, or look at important items you have picked up along the way. Once we have this feature working, we’ll be able to write around it as well, which will contribute to that feeling of continuity.

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Those are all the developments for now, we will be keeping in touch through here and Discord. A build release is planned for the end of December, but you shall at least hear from us before Christmas!