October Project Update

Hi everyone! It is time for another general project update, to compensate for the lack of general releases lately. Even if not much is happening on the outside, a lot is still brewing on the inside.

Truth be told, September and October were slower for all of us in the team due to life complications, a new school year, and so on. However, we still made plenty of progress on our goals for the end of the year.

As we mentioned previously, the reason for our prolonged periods of silence this year has been largely due to us taking a step back to analyze our plan for the remainder of the development process of this game. Since the last project update, we have started addressing the myriad of things we wanted to improve.

The story is where a lot of improvements will be visible with our next release. We have been making a lot of adjustments and decisions that will impact how the game's story feels like. Some of these include:

• adjusting the start of the game to be more in line with our (far more fleshed out) concepts for the spiritual/supernatural elements in the game.
• reducing the number of overall characters in the game (replacing Tish, the alligator bartender, with Garreth; replacing Berac, the informant you meet in day 5, with Camila; replacing OKI, the small receptionist aide, with a new patron character). Camila will also stop being a fully dateable character, now taking more of a side role to the story.
• naturally reworking all the story segments where these characters used to appear.
• drastically reducing the number of "one-liner choices" (only one choice appearing on the screen with an obvious action) and replacing them with normal story narration/dialogue. We'll probably keep the funnier ones though!

Aside from these, we are making a lot of changes internally to the game's content framework, including:

• reworking the character dating/"free time" system to better suit our plans for relationships in the game as well as refactoring a lot of the code surrounding it.
• adding artwork markers to all the existing content to make it way easier to identify where and which artwork we need to place in the game. (this goes for sprites, backgrounds, character side images and audio to a degree).
• rewriting most of the story segment identifiers (think of labels in Ren'Py) and story tracking variable names to use a common format (they all used to be very messy as a result of years of development back-and-forth). This will fully break save compatibility.

Phew! It's quite a lot to take in. And there's even more! LumixFey, our illustration artist, has finally gotten around to finishing a piece that we commissioned. It's for the alternative ending you get if you make a specific set of choices throughout the story and during Mindalu's encounter in day 4.

This is just a crop of it though, you're gonna have to wait a while longer to see it along with its variations in the game.

Along with that, we're also making progress on more sprites and side images, and our musician is learning how to use the audio tools in Godot which will help him implement more audio over time.

This about wraps it up! Let us know what you think of these changes, and feel free to suggest other improvements you might want to see in the game!