Build 0.6.0 Release & Changelog

Build 0.6.0 is here, and on a very special day too! Just yesterday we hit a total of ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOWNLOADS, with the main version of the game accounting for 94K and the SFW Mode for 6K.

I'd say that's worthy of celebration but we'll leave it for another time. Let's give the proper spotlight to Build 0.6.0!

Changelog

• Added 6 hangout scenes for Kota, completing his route and adding 27k+ words and a new CG to the game.
• Updated all of Kota's sprites and CGs. Added a much needed casual outfit he will occasionally change into throughout the game.
  
• Updated Greta and Ismael's sprites (the old ones are still shown on the speedrunner route).
  
• Added a small menu to give the option to skip Hinterlands 3 for second playthroughs, since that chapter will be a pain in the ass to skip through when replaying the game, and skip buttons for Hinterlands 2, 4 and 5.
• Small QoL update: staff members can be selected for sidequests in the daily agenda without needing to be unassigned from teams first (this will automatically pull them out of a team if they're in one).
  
• Minor edits to Robert's hangouts.
• Fixed typos and bugs for previous builds' content.
  

How to access the new content

As previously stated, 0.6 will focus on adding side content to Minotaur Hotel, and 0.6.0 will start with Kota's hangouts. These sections become available in Chapter 14, and can be accessed by selecting to hang out with him in the daily agenda menu. The next batch of builds will introduce side content as well, so we strongly recommend keeping a save file at the beginning of the chapter in order to access each build's content more quickly.

The last section of Kota's route is the longest, and will play automatically on the last day of chapter 17 at the earliest (for character development purposes). You get some extra dialogue depending on which guests you have at the moment, so you might want to save hangout #4 for when you have your fourth guest, but make sure hangout #5 is completed by chapter 16. The skip button is your friend.

(A lot of the oddities with this setup are due to Minotaur Hotel being a work in progress, this will make more sense when the game is finished and players can do side content in any order and with more free time available).

Hinterlands Skip

If you've replayed Minotaur Hotel to get different outcomes to chapter 18, or have different characters in the hotel, or get the achievements, you have probably realized that the Hinterlands III chapter breaks the flow of the Management sessions. It is, after all, essentially a mini VN inside stuck between two Management-intense chapters.

As you may know by now, I like the idea of the game being highly replayable and there being many neat things to find, and the Hinterlands was designed with that in mind. That said, as a general game design principle I like it when players have the tools to tailor their playthroughs. I think it shows respect to the player.

And, to top it off, the discussion the Hinterlands generated was so rich that I can say without a shadow of a doubt that it succeeded in its goal. We don't have to ask for people to "please give it a chance," and we really don't have to force people to replay it when they don't want to.

Putting all of this together, very happily we arrived at the conclusion that adding a "Skip Feature" to the Hinterlands was the right choice. If you have already finished it in a previous playthrough you'll get a slightly different introduction to the Hinterlands III section that allows you to skip to the next main story chapter.

The events of the Hinterlands do have an impact on the rest of the game of course, so we couldn't just make all the choices for the player and jump to the next chapter. So, you can select what P and Storm do over the chapter from the menu: which quests you complete, how many times P and Storm hang out together, if P gives Storm his jacket, etc.

Naturally, the options available to you will be limited to what you accomplished previously in your Hinterlands playthroughs. This still gives an incentive to play around with it, at least until you crack all the mysteries.

As a little treat, this section also gives you a thermometer of your overall progress. P, who narrates it, will inform you if you've seen all there is to find.

We've also added a skip button to Hinterlands 2, 4 and 5 as well.

So, R&D projects - what happened?

Nanoff here. So, long story short, I went apeshit when writing the new R&D projects that were supposed to go into the build, and the pool scene on its own ended up being 10k words long, a lot of which turned out to be a nightmare to edit. We decided not to rush these out, they will be added to one of the next updates instead. Sorry for the inconvenience, speedo Asterion will have to wait a little more.

Without further ado, here are the download links for the build:

Download Links

What's next?

The next update, 0.6.1, will feature all of Khenbish's hangout scenes and (hopefully) R&D projects that didn't make the cut. A lot of this content is already written, and we expect to release before May. We'll announce a release date as soon as we hop on to the editing phase.