October news post #1 (Patreon)

I'm slacking behind just a little bit, sorry everyone! >.< It's that time of the year again, as the leaves begin to change color and fall, the spooky candy filled month for all of you who love sitting back and enjoy getting scared from some movies, games maybe? I'd admit I do have a guilty pleasure and enjoy getting into the spooky mood for the month myself, but I'm sure you all aren't here to listen to what I personally like to do around this time of the year or what not. :P

If I'm not mistaken, many of you are here for the first real monthly news update on what to expect for update 0.16 and maybe a bit further into the future as we wrap up 2020.

Let's jump on into it! Firstly, update 0.16 is set to release on November 4th-7th. Will be mainly shooting for the 4th, but the extra days are just in case something comes up to case a minor delay.

What can we expect for update 0.16 content?

Moving forward, we're going to work on Episode 2. Which follows directly after Episode 1, where we'll see focus shifted towards 2 characters. One was hinted at the end of Episode 1.

So real briefly, Episode 1 or update 0.15 rather, brought with it the music included into the game. It's nice to hear the music added to the game to help give it a better feeling overall, but I'd like to just mention that regardless of how you feel about the music for the game. We get the impression that some of the tracks will get pretty old and quick. Seeing we only have 13 tracks, it's a bit rough, but we'd like to possibly get some more tracks made up either from our current music producer Fabled Ways, or try getting a bit of a different mix of tracks added in from some other music producers.

This will be something that'll take some time and won't be seen right away, as we'd like to gather feedback on the current music being added in the next few updates first. Plus we don't want to split up our budget again and cause our cg art to slow down by any means. Just expect that we'll be looking to make the music for the game feel nice to listen to and fitting. It's a new experience for myself to struggle with placing certain tracks and how often should one given track play, if it feels odd to swap it briefly for a very brief comedy moment or what not, etc.

So please do let us know your thoughts on the music heard so far, if anything seems off about it when paired with scenes and so forth.

Moving on, back to the main topic. Below is a list of what to expect roughly for update 0.16.

-Episode 2 added.
-Music added to Episode 2.
-3+ cg scenes added.
-Bridget redesign sprite added.
-New sprite expressions added.
-Splash art screen for Episodes begin added. (gui)

Let's break these down.

What's in Episode 2?

I won't spoil major events quite yet, but just briefly. Episode 2 does follow directly after Episode 1, so expect to have some stuff previously mentioned show up.

Episode 2 will be seen as a bit of a continuation of the slice of life life at the academy. There will be some light details brought up focused on new details of the academy story, some more explaining of how they run things. But we'll see 3 characters show up during this episode, with 2 of them being considered the major focuses of what events take place. While the other character is seen more briefly as some light build up for the future.

Music being added in Episode 2, any tracks we haven't heard yet?

It's hard to say for certain what tracks will be used yet, again with 13 tracks so far. Each sets the groundwork for what each one covers, if we do get some new tracks made in the future. We'll be looking at what seems to be missing from our range of music, so far the general thought in mind is that we're missing some more general daily life, easy going music that's light.

Any hints as to what the CG scenes being added in update 0.16 will be?

I won't spoil things out right, but just to give an idea of how ahead we are right now. We expected at least 3+ scenes this month to be finished before November 4th.

Not to jinx anything, but we have 2 of 4 scenes already finished with the other 2 in progress. That's coming from our lack of cg art that wasn't being seen for the last few months while we tried getting a good handle on how to handle things regarding cg art.

So for Episode 1 we originally had 3 scenes planned, I think only 1 placeholder screen or two are actually seen in update 0.15. But we have 2 fanservice style scenes in mind and 1 normal scene. I'm personally excited to see how everyone will enjoy these new beautiful scenes, the "normal" one should spark a interesting reaction for being something a little different to fit what takes place at the end of Episode 1.

Now before we wrap this question up, we'll have at least 1 cg scene for Episode 2 done and ready for it's release. We're kind of expecting 3 scenes for Episode 2, it might be possible that with some funding earned slowly this month or out of pocket. We'll try to get 2 of 3 scenes finished in time for Episode 2. That way update 0.16 brings 5 total scenes across both Episode 1 & 2.

That'd help big time with ensuring that for update 0.17 and Episode 3, that our cg art is caught up with our releases. That way when you play through new content, you won't see anymore placeholder screens and have a lesser experience as it's not fun to replay things again just to see the cg art for many.

Bridget redesign? I'm confused.

If you aren't up to date or missed out, Bridget is one of our last character's receiving a redesign. She'll be getting a bit of a visual change of course and with that, her personality will be a little more unique than it is currently.

Not to bring down any fans of how she currently is by any means, based off of our polls and general engaging with everyone. We see Bridget as the least popular character overall, we're not looking to make every character be seen as equally balanced by any means. It'd be crazy to think we could have a fully or near balanced cast like that.

But her ratings are so low that it's honestly a bit sad, we know there is some who do still like her still. Simply put, we're going to ensure she still looks similar to how she currently looks. Mainly you should be able to look at her current and new design and go "Oh, okay. Yeah that's Bridget"

Her personality bit that's changing a bit will give her a little more of a unique feeling and paired up with her streamer, video game focused aspects. We wish we had a concept sketch to show by now of Bridget, but hopefully sometime this weekend coming up. Keep your eyes peeled!

New expressions?

Our character sprites are receiving some new expressions, some are just minor tweaking of existing ones to help be more useful. Mainly we have some really popular ones for some characters like for Erika her "Worried" look is pretty fitting for her in a lot of scenes, but some of her other expressions like "Confused/Thinking" seem a bit off looking.

So for the most part, this is just looking at making expressions more suited for each character. We've slowly started work on this with Miki so far, knowing she's seen as energetic, loud, aloof and cute. We're keeping these aspects in mind for her expressions to be seen across her range.

Compare that to say Erika who is seen as a bit more plain, dorky/booksmart with a mix of being seen as typical annoying sibling.

But while we're doing this, we'll be seeing some lightly added new pieces added like new mouths, eyes or eyebrows for select characters to help be a little more fitting to their personalities and the range of expressions for them.

Splash art for episodes? What's that?

Maybe that's not quite the right term, but we're looking to have someone create "splash screen art" that will show up when a new Episode begins to really signal it more visually, compared to the black screen and text seen.

We have a early badly done mock up made by myself that I won't share. But said mock up will be roughly a good guideline for what I'm looking for to make these Episode screens, mainly the idea is that the screen will show a character's sprite on the left side of the screen. The "Messy Academy" logo towards the top right, with the episode "Episode 1" below that, with "We're required to wear what?!" below "Episode 1"

It should look nice once done and we hope to have this in the update to see for both Episode 1 & 2.

Kickstarter news? What's going on over there?

So in case it was missed, I put out a quick post before the 48 hour mark to quickly mention a huge thank you to everyone who's been helping spread the word of the project around, backing or supporting us through this and the main thing.

We're already past the 50% funded mark thanks to all of you! ^^ Now things will slow down naturally, we're starting to see it already. It seems normal for many projects to get a rush of support at the start and then slowly ease up for the mid section before boosting up a bit towards the final days again.

We don't want to set our expectations high, but we do hope to see us reach that 100% funded mark as it'll really help our major push for cg art being added, more so now than ever before. As I mentioned earlier, in about roughly 10 days we already have 2 of 4 planned cg scenes finished with the 3rd & 4th in progress. I'm not kidding when I believe they'll have have the 3rd scene finished this weekend and I'd be shocked if the 4th one wasn't done before midway next week.

That's how quickly they're getting through the requested cg scenes so far and by no means are they blindly rushing to make low quality art either. We've already shared one cg scene finished so far and we'll be sharing the other one here tomorrow.

The main point why I bring this all up, is that this is based on our patreon budget for the month of October. So imagine if we had just a little bit more support each month on said budget, we could easily see 6 cg scenes in a given month based on their speed.

Now not to hype or overwork our artists like that by any means, but if they are up to the task without feeling mentality exhausted with how much work is tossed their way. Then it really helps open up getting art placed in the game quicker, we can also lightly free up some of our monthly budget just enough to ensure we still deliver 5+ cg scenes per update and get other assets funded without either suffering for lack of funding.

(Also I'd like to mention a side note, we're aware that $25,000 as a goal is pretty wild. Like many other projects who do kickstarters, they all set high goals similarly to this. We by no means think that highly that we'd reach that goal or beyond it, honestly we'd be pretty shocked if it did. We just wanted to have all bases covered for everything, in the rare case the kickstarter did get higher than expected. Again, not something we're holding our breath over.)

What are the plans for the future updates? Do you have a road map of roughly what to expect?

Yes, we do actually! Do keep in mind it's roughly what we're expecting based on previous workloads and sometimes our expectations do get a little too high for the given month of work we put in sadly. It could be more or less than what we have listed, so do keep that in mind.

Update 0.17 (Dec 5th)

-Episode 3 added.
-Music added to Episode 3.
-4+ cg scenes added.
-Pajama outfits for Juliet, Rachel and Nova.
-OC character sprites caught up.
-Disclaimer splash art screen added. (gui)
-Music gallery added. (gui)
-CG gallery added. (gui)

Update 0.18 (Jan 4th)

-Episode 4 added.
-Music added to Episode 4.
-4+ cg scenes added.
-Diaper accident tracker stat menu splash art added. (gui)
-More save slots added. (10-15 total)

Update 0.19 (Feb 4th)

-Episode 5 added.
-Music added to Episode 5.
-4+ cg scenes added.
-Special Episode 5 splash art for choosing a girl. (gui)

~Conclusion~

I think that's a good enough spot to end our first news post for now, so we hope you have quite a fair view of how things are looking for not only our next update, but the future ones leading into early 2021.

Overall this month is a pretty exciting one for the fact there's the kickstarter taking place, we're already seeing great results for our push on cg art moving forward. We're hoping Bridget's redesign concept shared will be received well with many and possibly accept some feedback if there's major dislike over certain aspects.

The remaining months of 2020 will be a mix of stressful and proud moments, we feel like our track record in the past year for delivering on our expected content and on time delivery has been about 90%+

We can't fully be the judge of ourselves clearly, but we do feel that we're doing a good job so that content or updates aren't delayed. Sometimes our expectations on what we want in a update is just a little too far out of reach to get done in roughly the 30 days we have between new updates. But still, we try our best to deliver for everyone. ^^

With all that said, hope you all have enjoyed our first news post for October! We'll have 2 more spread out during the month, one about midway through and the last one towards the end of the month. Both updating the situations of how content is coming along for the update and some news for generally new stuff that's popped up between now and then.

From all of us at Messy Studios.
We hope you all have a safe spooky October!