Posted January 31, 2021 by Juicy Drake Studios
Hello everyone! As we promised at the end of last year, we intend to be more transparent with you about the progress of the game and our plans moving forward.
First things first, we recognize that 2020 was a slow year for us. We released 3 builds over 12 months, which is not enough to garner people's attention or interest. While they brought major changes to core parts of the game and reworked a lot of the existing content (more details on our retrospective of 2020), we found ourselves going back to pre-production for most of the year. Pre-production such as: planning the story of the game properly, how character routes should feel, how they would interact with and affect the game's plot, and so on. Internal discussions which are vital for any game development venture and which this project never really had to begin with, unfortunately.
Nevertheless, we came out of 2020 feeling better prepared than ever to take the story forward and make a better written and more presentable game by the end of this year. And this is exactly what we're going to do. Thus, we want to present you a roadmap for Identity development throughout 2021.
Beginning with better scheduling, we want to release new builds at a steady stream every two months. We are not yet in the position in which we could reliably release builds monthly in a way that wouldn't put tremendous pressure on our team, and having two months to both write and implement/polish content feels like a more comfortable undertaking for us.
The first build to come out this year will be at the end of February, and will focus on Garreth. It will include Garreth's third date and will replace the character Tish in the story (the alligator bartender you briefly meet during the first few days) with Garreth, while also making those encounters more elaborate. On top of that, we will be reworking days 2 and 3 to match the new style of writing that we debuted with the last build for day 1 (main difference is that internal monologues are replaced by 2nd person writing, matching the rest of the story).
At the end of April, there will be another build which will add two more dates with Cedrik and rework days 4 and 5 in terms of style, like mentioned above. The end of June will see Lucra's first 3 dates and a writing style rework for Kovle's dates.
By the end of August, we plan to release Draxima's first 3 dates, as well as a general content polish for the entire game (adding as many missing assets as we can, correcting anything else we may see fit and marking down what's still missing so that we can more easily correct them going forward).
We will also keep working throughout all this time to fill in the gaps for sprites, side images, audio and a few remaining backgrounds (perhaps also slightly reworking a couple of them which were made earlier in development) and also working on the backend game framework itself.
August represents a milestone for us, as we have been stuck in development hell for a few years now trying to write this first chapter and create all the assets that we needed for it, and generally plan out the placement of these assets. August will mark the end of this development hell, and at long last Identity's story will spring to life once more.
After August, we intend to release a couple more builds at the end of October and then December, which will introduce the beginning of chapter 2 with days 6 and 7, as well as Azorin's first 3 dates, and perhaps other content as well. For these new days, we hope to release them in a much more feature complete state which won't require us to keep returning to them over and over again to correct problems.
Of course, there may be many other smaller touches and additions sprinkled throughout the year, but in large terms this is what we want to do this year: get our game out of development hell, polish the first chapter to where we would feel comfortable pointing to it as a release demo for the game, and then start putting our butts in motion to get the story we've been planning actually written.
Please let us know what you think of the roadmap, and any comments or concerns you may have about it or the development of Identity in general, we are always happy to hear your feedback!