Dev Update (Patreon)

Hi All,

Episode 21 progress continues to go really well - October was a really good month with all 3 of us working continuously on the game.  No roadblocks / hiccups so I'm very happy with progress and we are still on track for a November release (latter half of the month).

I also spent a lot of time auditioning new writers this month to try to expand the team.   We had over 50 applicants and are currently down to a shortlist of 3 candidates.  It's a difficult task  to try to find someone who is up to the task.  At the moment, (in my opinion) it would be difficult for people to distinguish which scenes are written by me and which ones are written by Ace and that's exactly the goal so that you, the player, never feel like there are different styles / writers working on the game (It should read like a single writer).   With Ace / me, we are completely on the same wavelength, so to bring a third person in that fits the bill is a long/tenuous process and if I feel none of the candidates meet the bar, then we will not extend the team as I do not want to decrease quality as the game progresses.

The longest part of the writing process is dealing with all of the variables, branches, multiple options, etc.   If it was just a matter of writing dialog in a movie-script format, then our lives would be so much easier!  :)  So that's one of the difficulties we have with onboarding a new writer.   (We scare them off when they look at our branching and how many previous decisions we need to keep track off :) )

It is also worth a mention that I don't know how Cell keeps up with the artwork demands.   Considering he has me and Ace throwing work at him constantly and considering how many renders and animations we squeeze into every episode, it's crazy that he can keep up.  He is a machine!!!   So that's also why having another writer on-board will help.  Writing is currently the bottleneck so having a third writer onboard will help alleviate that and could also free me up to spend a little more time helping Cell out with artwork.

But either way, the November timeline for episode 21 release is not dependent on us increasing the team.  So even if it remains at us 3, we are still well on track for November.

Reminder of the girls who will appear in Episode 21:  (Monica*, Jenna*, Katie, Elaine, Bella*, Angel*, Theresa*, plus a surprise.)  The girls with an * have a "starring" role in the episode while those that don't have the asterix have a smaller / supporting role.

Let me know if any questions,

Thanks,

CG