Welcome to the RELEASE WEEK devlog for "HIS LAST MACHINATION!" There's enough to cover here that I postponed finishing and publishing this devlog until a day later than normal, purely because I wanted to ensure it was reasonably coherent. As one could imagine, this one's going to be fairly dense, so without further delay:

April 26th

• Today marked the full implementation of background art (thank you, Elina!!) along with testing and implementation for camera panning in the backgrounds for both Abram's cottage (interior) and Pietro's room.
• Text retiming was completed for Ending 1.
• Formatting on the itch page was adjusted slightly to improve legibility.
• With Ves' permission, I made a gradient version of Petra to serve as the game icon!
• The entire game was tested end-to-end, aiming for and successfully reaching Ending 3.

(Pietro might be bummed about receiving a proper background, but the team certainly isn't! Goodbye, "Pietroomday" placeholder...)

April 27th

• MAJOR MILESTONE: Text retiming was completed for the remaining branches of scene 3.1 and Ending 3, meaning that all text retiming to sync with dialogue is now complete!
• A setting to swap between the default font (High Tower Text) and a dyslexia-friendly font (Atkinson Hyperlegible) was added to the options menu; the latter is slightly smaller than the former to avoid text formatting quirks/text "bleed."
• The spacing for certain settings on the Options menu was adjusted, and certain extraneous features were removed—most notable among these is the purposeful exclusion of the Text Speed slider, as adjusting the character loading speed throws off the timing as synced with dialogue. (Players can still click/press Enter or Space to load the rest of the text in a given dialogue box immediately, should they not want to see it scroll.)
• MAJOR MILESTONE: The first testing build of the game (v0.8) was built and uploaded for QA testing by other members of the team!

April 28th

• Today marked the first QA test from Kylie, who pursued and reached Ending 3. A mysterious (and, as we later learned, recurring but Kylie-specific) bug relating to the timing of Petra's song in scene 2.2 was found, in which her song cuts off prematurely.
  • Replication of this bug proved impossible on other computers, but the timing of the CG in which the song plays was still adjusted (adding a few seconds of extra/arguably unnecessary time at the end) in a bid to resolve the issue.
• The announcement graphic for the overall project was created and prepped for posting on the 1st.
• I started drafting what I can only describe as "hype-doodads" for each of the three actors in the cast. They're a bit embarrassing in their sentimentality, but I care more about celebrating the trio's (genuinely spectacular) work than whether or not I mildly embarrass myself on the Internet.

April 29th

• A teaser video featuring Valeria was posted to Bluesky to celebrate being 36 hours away from the launch of the game.
• Kylie QA'd the game for both Ending 1 and Ending 2!
• An issue involving the repetition of post-Petra-CG dialogue (if the CG was skipped before its timer had reached 0) was resolved.
• In order to prevent potential game-flow issues related to both variable incrementation/decrementation and players being locked to a choice after its selection, individual choice variables were implemented and tested (thus allowing for the player to "roll back" and reset a given choice variable should they choose an option in error).
• v0.9, with the updated variables and patched dialogue repetition issue, was uploaded to itch for testing.
• The itch page's installation instructions had their formatting updated to better match the page's overall design.
• Rose and his husband QA'd 0.9 and found that a testing variable had not been turned off, thus leading to v0.91 being uploaded to itch in its stead. This also added a fadeout to the Petra SFX if her CG is skipped.

April 30th

• MAJOR MILESTONE: 1.0 (launch build) was prepped today.
• The game icon was copied and converted to a Mac-friendly format.
• Embed buttons for the game were prepped!
• The timing bug related to Petra's CG was tested again and found to not be reliably replicable on any computer except for Kylie's—I'm utterly baffled as to why Petra doesn't like Kylie's machine in particular?
• The "hype-doodads" for each of the three actors were finished.
• Final preparations were made for social media posts/a mini-thread for Bluesky.
• Four people have cried whilst QA testing the game. That's not a milestone; I just think it's neat (read: am glad I wasn't the only one).
  
• Movie playback functions were tinkered with in a bid for the opening and ending movies to use the same volume setting as overall game VO (rather than being pathed to the same volume setting as in-game music). Although this resulted in partial success, the fact that it also resulted in occasional playback quirks/unpredictability was deemed to pose more potential issues than "slightly-quieter-than-ideal" video volume.
• MAJOR MILESTONE: the 1.0 Windows and Mac builds of the game were uploaded to itch for publication on the morning of the 1st.

May 1st

RELEASE DAY!

• MAJOR MILESTONE: 1.0 was released!
• The "big, scary button" (publishing the game's page, thus rendering it and its 1.0 builds public-facing) was pressed 3 hours earlier than initially intended.
• Promo posts were pushed on Bluesky and in various Discord communities. These materials were also emailed to one of our actors per request (so that they wouldn't be lost).
• I struggle to coherently articulate just how proud I am of this team, but please know all 9 folks working alongside me over the last 2 months deserve every ounce of congratulations and praise folks could fling their way. I'm so, so grateful to everyone for helping to make this game a reality.

My greatest possible thanks goes out to Kylie, Elina, Rumi, Ves, Rose, Lu, Katie, Robyn, and Sean.

HIS LAST MACHINATION genuinely would not exist in its present state without each and every one of you.

(Alas! I am but a sentimental goof.)

Post-Launch Updates/Metrics

• Since its 1.0 launch, HIS LAST MACHINATION has been downloaded 25 times.
• Multiple people who have played it have gone through the game at least twice in order to reach all 3 endings.
• The mysterious and ever-elusive Petra timing bug has not proven reliably replicable.
• The voice acting, score, environmental design, and character design (both sprites and CGs) seem to be special highlights.
• Average runtime for one end-to-end playthrough seems to hover between 45 and 80 minutes, depending on the player's reading speed and which ending they reach.

Thank you very much for following these devlogs across the past nine weeks! My plan is to convert them from typical Posts into true Devlogs (now that the itch page for the game is public-facing) and eventually make reliable HTML backups for them on a secondary site.

The entire team and I sincerely hope you enjoy the game!! (And, should you need an antidote to the emotional damage contain therein...there are always the bloopers...)