Dev log 26 (Patreon)

It's been a while since last dev log. As a reminder, in the previous one we made a poll on what people would prefer: a short mini-update or focus on the big update and release it without delay for small update. And the general consensus was the big update is more important.

So what's being done during this time and when is the update  coming out? To answer quickly, as I was afraid it likely wont come earlier than October, and the current ideal plan is to keep it within that month. Reasons why we keep overestimating our deadlines are multiple but the main one is inexperience tbh. When we started this project, updates were much more basic, involved much less details in both quests and visuals. But now that we think we are more experienced and should work more efficiently, we add extra layers of quality/quantity than before and it bounces back.

Not to worry, we are are still highly focused on finishing the game in reasonable time-frame and actively stop ourselves from committing to feature creep and avoiding reworking of existing content. So... What has being done since last dev log?

We are currently finishing up big CG scenes with our new girl of the update, visuals are done, rigging is done, and all left is a bit of writing and animation. For purpose of avoiding spoilers you'll have to stare at Redic's ass instead for now. The new girl brought us a bit of design challenges and some other things to deal with, but we expect people would appreciate variety in designs in our female cast.

As for locations it was the biggest challenge in this update, since we had to produce no less than 14 new ones in total. Some of them are fairly small, and some are quite huge to a point Sai2 struggles to load them properly again. All location visuals are finished and implemented into the game. We are also experimenting with new lighting system/approach for more visual flexibility and nice graphic effects to make eye candy even more sweet. Quest skeleton is done as well, and need mostly dialog/events/misc adjustments mostly as well replacing placeholders.

So whats left? To summarize shortly: CG scene animations, polishing up quest, sprite-work and combat/rpg mechanics additions. First 2 were mentioned before, sprite-work essentially means all on world walking NPCs/enemies/whatever visuals. All of them are done and just need rigging and sometimes animating (to save up time some npcs share animations). And finally the combat/rpg elements meaning new enemy behaviors/AI cards plus leveling up trees for redic and companions which we promised a while ago.

So all in all we finished all the hard parts of this update already, what's left is mopping up left over tedious work, polishing, bug testing and we are ready to go. We don't want to rush the release since so much of first impression value at stake, so we will deliver it best and most finished state we can.

If you have question towards development please feel free to ask(except spoiler questions ofc).

-Arbuz