September Progress Update (Patreon)

Hmm... where to start. The team has been fairly split up this month working on different things as we plan for the remainder of season 1. 

I was kind of hoping an obvious winner would emerge from the poll early on so I could get a head start on the planning, but ya'll got me on the edge of my seat in suspense as the first place position has changed a few times over the first couple weeks. So we've been having a lot of talks about the details of our plans for all those characters. 

In the meantime, I spent the first part of the month doing some updates to Tainara's episode, both after finding bugs and typos and in response to player feedback, including features and changes like a "pure visual novel" text mode for those who wanted to skip the minigame; and alternate dashing controls for those who *do* want to play the minigame but had problems with the controls. 

The minigame was a bit divisive, but one of the nice things about doing an episodic structure like this project is it lends itself well to trying out different things. The goal for Tainara's episode, with incorporating that minigame was to try to do something with some "actual" gameplay with varied end results based on player performance. 

Some of you may be pleased to hear that we're taking a step back from that in Amaryllis's episode, in that it's "minigames" aren't action based are are pretty much just text/dialogue based interactions. Our "goal" for this episode is to have meaningful choices with consequences and multiple endings. So that should make things a bit more interesting for the story. 

For those of you who did enjoy the minigame, you might likewise be pleased to hear we're working on fleshing it out a bit more to stand on it's own as it's own game, Including improved AI, customizable controls, more characters, a full single player arcade and local 2 player vs modes. (Don't worry, with our current division of labor neither of those two projects should affect the speed of the other) 

Back to Amaryllis's episode the team is currently hard at work on the art/writing; while I'm actually in the process of redoing some of the UI and interfaces in order to convert the original demo to Naninovel, since it's just so much more efficient to work with than the systems the original demo used; the time spent on the update will be more than made up for when it's time to plug the finished scripts into the game. (Plus it has a better saving and loading system and a few other benefits) So it'll have the same core interface Tainra's episode did, and it seems like that's the system we'll probably stick with moving forwards.

We should have new demos/builds for both those games next month.