0.1.2 Delay and 0.1.3 Plans

Hey, guys, just wanted to give you a little update so you know how things are going to be shaping up for the next month or so. First off, version 0.1.2 was released last night to my Patreon after being delayed for a couple of days. I spent the first two weeks of May getting stuff in order for the itch.io launch so I didn't have as much time to work on it as I would have liked, hence the delay. To honor my commitment to my patrons, that means the public build is also going to be delayed until the 17th of this month.

As for what you guys can expect in the future, version 0.1.2 fills in the missing paths from 0.1.1a during Asher's November 22nd and 23rd. Asher/Colby scenes won the Patreon poll, so version 0.1.3 (which will come out in July) will be adding more of that. I've been going through all the feedback I've received and come up with some plans on how to address some of the criticisms in the coming month. I want to thank everyone who took the time to fill it out, even if some of the responses I got were a little more brutal than I would have liked, haha. A lot of it has been very useful to me, I'd only ask that you guys keep in mind that there is another person on the other end of that survey. You can tell me if you think something is severely lacking and needs improvement without getting nasty about it.

The most common complaint I received was respondents asking for more character interactions.I also received some hand-written feedback about the messaging system feeling underutilized and players wanting to have more decisions to make. To address this, I'm going to start using the messaging system to do more than just decide path branching when characters aren't face-to-face and extend it to have some short, casual conversations with characters who aren't currently in the scene. This will hopefully help flesh out the characters a bit more, give you more choices to make, and it'll also give more opportunities to rack up relationship points with various characters.

Character sprites needing more refinement was another big one. I touched on this during my last devlog, but I wanted to mention it again here to be thorough. Some time after Four-Letter Word went on hiatus, a Ren'Py update introduced support for dynamic images. I was already planning on converting existing sprites into these to cut down on file size, but I'm now also going to use this opportunity to do touch-ups to the sprites and make them higher resolution. The process will be a gradual one over time starting with version 0.1.3, but eventually all of the sprites should end up looking nicer.

Another thing that's going to see gradual improvements over time is the music. Thanks to some very helpful suggestions, I'm working on replacing some of the VST plugins I've been using to get some more natural-sounding instruments. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just swapping them in and the process of tweaking them is quite time-consuming. So far only one of the tracks is in a state where it's good to go, and you can hear it in version 0.1.2 when it releases. The rest will follow eventually, time-permitting. I'm still on the lookout for some solid piano and string plugins, so if you know of any free or cheap ones I could pick up, do let me know. Thank you!