Crashes and this is a Spoilerpost. (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

first of all, no image today. I ran into some issues this week that slowed down my progress quite a bit.

My PC keeps crashing, and I honestly don’t know why. It used to happen maybe once a week while running the engine I’m using, which was annoying but manageable. But yesterday it got much worse. It crashed, I restarted it, and before I could even enter my password to log into Windows, it crashed again. That was not a good sign.

After that, I couldn’t log in at all. Every time the system started, it would crash immediately.

So what did I do? I reset everything and reinstalled my setup from scratch. Thankfully, because I regularly back up my work, I only lost about half a day. Considering how bad the situation looked, that’s honestly not too bad.

Right now, things are back to the usual level, meaning it crashes about once a week again. Still not great, but at least usable. I’ve talked to other developers using the same tools, and some of them experience similar issues while others don’t. So I’m starting to think it might be a hardware problem.

It could even be my CPU. After I bought it, I found out that this model apparently has something like a 50 percent failure rate, which is honestly insane. I don’t even understand how something like that can still be sold. But anyway, I will leave that rant for another time.

The important part is that I’m back to working at full speed again. I lost maybe a day to a day and a half in total, but thanks to backups, it could have been much worse.

Seriously, back up your stuff. Imagine if I hadn’t.

Progress on the Game

On the development side, I finished the scenes I talked about last time.

I also spent some time thinking about the structure of the current chapter. For those of you who played the teaser, you know that there are some combat-heavy scenes coming up, and what you saw is only about half of it. And while I do enjoy writing and animating those, I have been thinking more about adding variety.

I did not really come up with a new idea, since it was already planned, but I decided to implement it differently.

What do I mean?

In the next chapter, there will be a section with three different viewpoints, and the player can choose the order in which they experience them. You will be able to see all of them, but the sequence is up to you.

The order itself does not matter too much, but the choices you make within each viewpoint will matter a lot.

The three perspectives are:

MC’s viewpoint, dealing with Sikel, trying to uphold his word, and freeing Christian

Gabriel’s viewpoint, who is normal again and dealing with a disagreement between himself and Nael

Emma’s viewpoint, going to the High Order and trying to stop an assassination. It is not exactly an assassination, more a mix of assassination and sabotage, but I cannot find the perfect word for it. Probably inside job?

Emma’s section will be the one I focus on the most. I do not want to reveal too much yet, but it will involve a bit of light investigative gameplay. Not a full detective system, just a small segment to mix things up.

I am really looking forward to this part because it helps balance the pacing. We have intense action at the beginning, then more dialogue where characters process what happened and talk about what comes next. Adding this small investigative section gives us some extra variation.

Emma is also the perfect character for this. Justice and fairness are extremely important to her. Remember back in Chapter 1, when she was not a big fan of the MC, she still stood up for him when something unfair happened.

Because of that, she fits naturally into this kind of role.

Also, the reason we do not play as the main character in this section is because of Ciarara. With her abilities, she could simply look into people’s minds and past, and immediately know what happened or who is lying. That would remove any challenge from the investigation. Emma, on the other hand, has to figure things out herself.

And since her partner is Arsael, who is not particularly strong when it comes to deduction, she really has to rely on her own reasoning, and you will have to help her. And do not worry, Arsael will still play a big role in it. You know good cop, bad cop? If Emma is the good cop, you know something is up.

It will be more about finding clues and classifying them correctly, or recognizing contradictions and motives in others and exposing inconsistencies.

But all in all, I think it will be interesting. Like I said, it will not be very large, and there will also be no free roam segment. I dislike those a lot in visual novels, so I do not think I will ever add one to my game. And if I do, it will be a rather small one.

The description here probably makes it sound more complicated than it really is. So for those of you who are not too keen on it, do not worry. I will find a reasonable compromise, and if necessary, you can just skip it and hope you guess right, because not finding the solution is a valid outcome. It will just change the story a bit.

I think that contrast will make the segment interesting.

That's all for today folks, Have a good time and take care of yourselves.

Berki