September Dev Update (Patreon)

Hi Everyone! August here with your September update (ha).

WRITING:

Writing continues; I'm finally nearing the end of a first draft of some scenes that have been plaguing me for a while. While I love our resident spirit bear Melody, they're difficult to write for. Not only do they have strict grammar rules that we have to follow (that also feel really weird and sort of like mistakes) for narrative reasons, they also have to deliver exposition in a natural way without it being heavy handed or out of place. (There's other requirements/necessities for Melody that make them difficult, but I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll hush now.)

We're also in the middle of working on the emotional crux scenes at the moment. Sebastien's arc hinges on the effectiveness and believability of the conflict and resolution of his arc. That's taking more time because it needs to.

ART:Art is still in progress of course! I can't show a few backgroundy things that have been finished (spoilers), but have a poofy birdie. What could Jo possibly be whispering to Peach to ruffle her feathers like that, I wonder?

LOCALIZATION:

We've lined up some individuals to do translating for us for episode 1 and 2 in the following languages:SpanishPortuguese Chinese (Simplified)French

I cannot guarantee the timelines of these localized scripts; we hope to launch the new episode 1 + 2 with support for all 4 languages, but that will depend on the translators and factors outside our full control. We don't want to delay the release significantly while waiting on localization; if one language is lagging behind for whatever production reason, we'll add it in a patch post-release.

ENGINE/PROGRAMMING:

I'll go ahead and show you one of the improvements we made to our engine that adds a little bit more motion and aliveness to the whole thing:

I want to add that this was a suggested feature by a reader, and it was fairly easy to implement and looks great. The more keen among you might notice that there's a single frame or two where some sprite layers load before others, so from this early concept we've further refined it to just do the fade in motion; when sprites leave the screen, they'll just blip out instantly. This actually felt better in general to in and out animations both playing for every sprite appearance/disappearance.

VOICE ACTING?!:

Yes, we're looking into this and what the budget would be like. All indications I have at the moment regarding this as a potential option in future releases are as follows:

It'd need to be crowdfunded in some manner, likely - our budget would strain pretty heavily trying to add this on.

It would be optional. First off, it's likely that it'd be offered as a paid DLC, so if you didn't want voice acting, there you go, you just wouldn't download the DLC (the main product will remain free while in development). If you did download the VA DLC, there would still be a slider to control volume for voices; you'd just turn all the way down if you prefer to read yourself rather than listen. The only reason it'd likely be a DLC is because full voice acting is expensive to do. We'd need to recoup some of the costs some way.

100% of the script would be voice acted (meaning there would be a dedicated narrator).

There would likely be sound design/foley additions and tweaks to increase immersion alongside the voice acting.

I was surprised at the number of people who came out in support of adding voice acting when I asked about it on socials and the Telegram channel, so we'll continue the discovery process of looking at budgets and a potential path forward on it. I personally would love to add voice acting, so hopefully this pans out, but I'll update everyone on where this stands next month.

That's all for now. Thanks for sticking with us during our development cycle; sorry it's taking a while, but episode 2 is very very very ambitious (and long - 2.5x the length of episode 1). I hope you'll find the wait worth it, because it's coming out quite nicely so far!

Until next month,

August