Build 0.5 Release Date:

AUGUST 20th

That's right! After months of hard work we are ready to announce the release date of Build 0.5! It's coming out on August 20th and adds approximately 300,000 words to the game.

Yes, that's right! Three hundred thousand words that make up an absolutely gargantuan update which, roughly, doubles the amount of content in the game. It includes:

• Chapters 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 which, altogether, immensely advance the story and characters of Minotaur Hotel.
• The Hinterlands, which includes a detective/exploration-like segment where you'll get to know more about the history of the hotel, how the world outside of it works and two new characters.
• Four new recruitable characters: Robert the demon, Themba the grootslang, Khenbish the boar and Wolf the wolf.
• The completed Ruthless Route, where you can witness what unfolds should the player character of Minotaur Hotel stay true to his god-given duty as Master of the Labyrinth.
• And much, much more!

It took us a while, but we did it! You will be able to play Minotaur Hotel precisely as we envisioned it. Thank you for the patience, soon you will see that it was worth the wait.

Questions & Answers

To celebrate this occasion, we are sticking to the tradition we set up in the previous launches: we will do a Questions and Answers (Q&A) session. You can send us your questions about the game, its development, the characters — everything, really — and we will answer them in the days leading up to the launch. Just post it as a comment here and we'll get to it!

(Note: We may not answers questions that are too spoiler-y.)

Now, before we get to July's actual Progress Report, there's one final announcement we have to make...

Backgrounds with GigaSaddle

Starting with Build 0.5 we will have GigaSaddle, creator of Pervader, doing background art for us. We won't be posting them here, as we want everyone to experience them in-game first, but suffice it to say that we are sure you'll like them!

I highly suggest you check Giga's VN, just click on the link below:

New Banner & Cover Art with Systemic Gaze

To celebrate the approaching release, thanks to Systemic Gaze we'll do an overhaul on the game's page and cover art. Starting tonight we'll have a new banner on top of the page, and as soon as the new build hits we'll update the cover art to include new illustrations on it.

The image on top of this Devlog and the one right below are both Systemic Gaze's work! Follow him on Twitter if you like what you see.

With all of that said...

July's Progress Report

Main Chapters

The main priority this month was to finish writing the the last stretch of content. Chapter 18 was, of course, the largest pending task. If you check the last Progress Report you will see that it was only 30% written.

Over the course of July we did all the writing that was left. The whole Chapter is about 35,000 words long, divided into about 16 "scenes" (some big, some small) where a great deal of your choices throughout the game culminate. Writing this chapter was both difficult, fun and intensely collaborative. I'm very hopeful that it will be a great conclusion for this build.

Right now Chapter 18 is being edited by two of our team members — one of which finished his editing a few days ago, and the other is about halfway done. We'll begin moving the first half of the chapter over to the VN shortly, which should save us some time later down the road.

We also did some edits to the end of Chapter 17, to add a better transition into the final stretch of the build.

Side Character Content

This month we also finished Asterion's side content and Wolf's introduction.

However, Wolf works a little different than the other two optional characters you can choose instead (Themba and Khenbish), and he requires a little extra writing push to have players be able to use him for R&D and exploration. Thankfully it's relatively short, so it doesn't expand the scope of the build very much. At one point I wondered whether we'd have to leave some big gaps of optional content to fill in later, but we managed to add pretty much everything we wanted.

Ruthless Route

The Ruthess Route, as stated before, is finished.

Hinterlands

All the Hinterlands content is finished! There were a couple of optional locations that we weren't sure going to make the cut, but they all made it in, with a total of 14 spots to explore. Chapters 4 and 5 were very quick to put together in comparison, but still had their fair share of unique assets.

Speaking of which...

Art Assets

Most of the graphic assets like sprites, illustrations and backgrounds are already done ahead of time. With that in mind, moving the writing over to the game shouldn't take long.

While the writers continue editing the content, I had the time to do some further edits to Asterion's sprites. I don't believe we touched on this on previous devlogs, but I've been working on the big guy here and there for the last couple months.

Asterion's sprites were the first assets I made when we started working on the VN, so naturally they've been needing a bit of an update. Here's a comparison between 0.4 and 0.5 sprites:

Not to blow my own horn but I'd say it's a substantial improvement.

I've also made another very special CG, bringing the total up to 4 for the build. Three of which have to account for stuff like what Asterion is wearing and other factors, so a lot of work went into those.

Speaking of sprites made very early on in development that were in need of an update...

Argos plays a major role in the build so, naturally, he's getting a lot of new sprites and a general cleanup to his old ones.

Other assets made this month include more clothing sprites for Asterion, Storm and P, and some new NPCs.

And also... back in April we revealed the finished Themba sprites, after asking for feedback on the design and having people vote for which one they preferred. The final design came down to two choices, we went with the brown one. But we also mentioned that if we had the time, we could implement both...

Now, it's not the exact SAME color scheme as the one in GigaSaddle's concept art — the red/orange eyes were a problem. I couldn't get them to look as good as Giga's, and there's also the concern that Themba's eyes have to do most of the heavy work when it comes to conveying emotion, so we kept them yellow. I hope the one guy that spammed the form with the same answer twenty times to skew the results is happy — oh yes, we noticed. We're onto you.

And so (unless anything else comes up as chapter 18 gets added to the VN), all the art assets for 0.5 are done! That means implementing the remaining content currently being edited will take less time since I don't have to bother making or getting new backgrounds.

Quality Assurance

We're getting very close to being finished with 0.5. Considering that all that's missing from the VN at this point is chapter 18 and Wolf chapter 2, and we have A LOT of content done that needs to be tested, we have begun doing internal QA testing with the other devs and a couple trustworthy friends a couple weeks ahead of release.

So far the response from the testers has been great, and lots of small issues keep popping up and getting addressed, so this will result in a much more polished build that hopefully won't require a 0.5.1 hotfix. In fact, we had a big problem pop up right away:

RenPy 7.4.5

RenPy, the engine Minotaur Hotel runs on, got updated to 7.4 very late last year. At the time we decided not to upgrade, since it was an unstable version and a lot of our custom UI and character sprites were breaking all the time. We stuck with 7.3.5 until very recently thinking we could get away with it, but alas, when making an Android version for QA, we were forced to update to 7.4.5. Fortunately, this is a much more stable version, and fixing all the issues that popped up from updating only took a couple days.

This update (and switching computers early in the year after an issue) did have two unforeseen issues:

1. Android save files will be reset. The old .keystor is in my old PC, which unceremoniously passed away earlier this year. You can still catch up to the latest content by using the skip function, though. Lesson learned: back your shit up.
2. The new version of the game will not be compatible with Windows XP. Demonchild22 raised this issue in the forums. If you absolutely cannot upgrade your PC or try the Android version, we can put together a build using Renpy 7.3.5, but we cannot guarantee that it will be bug free.

To close it up...

As you can see, we are on the last stretch before release. To prepare everything for release, over the next few days we will tinker a bit with the game's page and hopefully make it look better. Don't be surprised if a few things change! We also started a new thread in the forums for general discussion relating to Build 0.5 — feel free to go wild and have fun with it.

Also, just to make it very clear, we will change the game's cover art into a fresh new .gif when the new update comes out, so watch out for it!