Late Jan. Progress Update (Patreon)

Hello all you fantastic supporters!

I wanted to give an update on where things are for the month, and how progress is going. I've also included a few scrap image generations from some of my testing.

For the sprite rework, I'm very pleased with the results of all the polls, and I'm looking forward to starting work on actually making the new sprites relatively soon. There will be more posts as I go through the process, and I plan on streaming some of the work on Discord for you wonderful patrons. Details around that will come later, but it will be similar to the stream for Dean's List Supporter mini-commissions.

As for the coding/writing of the next day of story content, I have good news and bad news. The good news is I'll be getting some help from a few other people with the writing, and I have the majority of the next day planned out for content and scenes. The bad news is I am behind on actually writing the code for the update and I am not sure if I'll be able to complete it in time for an end of month release. This is the result of the start of this year being unexpectedly busy for me and my family, and also a result of my own procrastination. I was very excited and focused around the sprite rework that I did not spend enough time on the actual coding side.

But, it's not all bad news, and I do plan to release something this month. One thing I'll be looking into is how Ren'py packages and archives files, for two reasons. First, putting files in an archive will help protect the game files and make them more difficult to access. This is a good thing moving forward, especially with the new sprite rework, as I would like to have all the new stuff properly protected. Second, placing files in an archive will drastically reduce the total number of files, which will allow me to create a Web Browser version of the game available to play on Itch.io. Having a web browser playable version will allow those who have hardware related crashes to play through the game. There may be some quirks around the browser version, so it will start as an early access thing for patrons first.In addition to changing how files are packaged, I plan on trying to get a few backend fixes done if I can. One of those is to re-enable the "start a new game" option from the "end game" menu.

I know delaying story content sucks, and I'm sorry for that. I want to release something this month, so I need to choose what to prioritize. I could try to focus only on the next day of content, but I don't want to rush it or end up missing the deadline, which will mean nothing gets released at all this month. So, instead of missing a deadline, I'm going to shift priorities slightly and still release something, along side continuing to work on the sprite rework and writing for the next story content release. I'll keep you all updated as things progress.

Thank you as always for your support and understanding.

 - K. Bro