DevLog Update (Patreon)

Hoooooly crap.

First up: sup. 

I been off work on a--let's call it a working vacation--over the past week with specific intent to get this fucking update done. I'll admit that I was fairly optimistic about this and had planned to burn through it hardcore for a couple days and hopefully be done with the bulk of the work by Wednesday to allow some time for an actual vacation. Unfortunately, it's Monday now and I just now got the game to boot for the first time last night. So here we go with an update and we'll end with some projected good news for a change. 

Writing

So if you haven't gotten a chance to look at the Overview page, the rough draft on the writing is finally finished. So I've spent ample time apologizing for the delay on this update; However --no joke-- looking at the size of this thing, the length may actually justify the part of the delay on this bad boy. I would argue that the dev team has pushed out over 1,000 hours easily into this one. It's the hardest and longest we've worked yet. I keep having this vision about doing one update that's a little more casual to give us a breather but things never work out that way. While I'm just now starting bug testing and revisions of the draft, the game does boot and is working at this time (see the Patreon Lens for a lame-ass pic). Length-wise, we're not going to break the previous record held by v0.15.1. The v0.15 update remains the longest at around 2,800 lines of code. The current build of v0.16 is almost 2,600 right now so we'll see if that changes during the revisions but it's probably going to take the silver medal for length. 

I'll also note that early plans were to finish the outline for v0.17 before we completely finished v0.16. I had a couple fan questions about this early on and I forgot to publicly address them. We're gonna scrap that because I think we have enough of an outline for it now so for anyone still stressing about the v.017 outline progress being somewhat stagnant, it's not as much of a priority right now and shouldn't delay the release of v0.16. Originally, we had planned to work these updates together because a lot of important shyt goes down in Chapter 8 but I think we're good right now.

Images/Animations

So images in this update will  set the record. v0.15 had the previous record for images at 232. v0.16 in his current build is not completed with images right now but we already have 279 new pics coded in with a few leftover ones being worked on while I'm doing the second draft revisions. You'll also be treated to some animation eye candy early in the update plus another text animation, both done by Lazy Jayke. 

On the other hand, we're still attempting to work through some obstacles with getting Daz3d (the animation program I use) and Blender (the program Lazy Jayke uses). You'll see a few images in this update that may look a little different as we try to better coordinate these programs together and work some of those kinks out.  Don't worry, this will affect a minimal number of images in the update but we did want to let you know we're aware of it. There will be a learning curve for us with this so we'll ask for a bit of patience with some of the textures or lighting on those images.

Release Date

Aight, so here's the shit most of y'all care about. Since things are working right now, I'm hoping we can finish things up soon. In a beautifully perfect world, I'd like to have this bitch out sometime this week. Obviously, we could run into some problems and my vacation is officially over now so I'm back to work full-time again with all of that nonsense catch-up that happens when you leave for a week. So no promises--but hopefully the update will be out sometime within the next 7 days. I still wanna drop another teaser pic but a lot of things just seem like either massive spoilers or just another position in the dorm room or whatever. We'll see, though.

I think this sums it up pretty good for where we are right now. 

It's coming, folks.

Few more days...

-Aaryn