September Devlog

Hallo! Time for the September wrap-up!

I know this one is coming a little bit early but due to life circumstances right now, my "weekend" is basically Wednesday. 

And the upcoming week is also going to be a little busy so I wanted to write and post the update while I know I have time to do it - even if it's a bit early.

So yeah, let's jump into where things stand with development.

Ramble

The short version of this month is that I did a lot of work and I released the beta of Episode 1 (containing Prologue, Ch1, Ch1 bonus scenes, and Ch2) to Patreon beta testers at the "Black Tea" level.

That's the short version. The long version is below.

So let's get into the details.

Summary

• Finished the play test of Daaz's Route
• Finished the play test of Asher's Route
• Finished Asher and Daaz's Ch2 CGs
• Completed Cim's sprite
• Coded all remaining expressions through Ch1 and Ch2
• Coded the bonus scenes
• Finished implementing the flowcharts through Ch1 and Ch2
• Sent the content to someone for alpha testing
  • Made corrections
• Sent the beta content to someone for a very tiny beta run
  • Made more corrections
• Sent the beta out to Patreon
  • Made even more corrections
  • Currently still making said corrections
• Technically started working on some minor code bits for Episode 2
• Planning for more bonus scenes

Writing

NONE. Unless you count correcting hyphens and commas and copious misuse of compound words. In which case I did a lot of that.

Artwork

Received new BGs and BG sketches, of course. 

Completed some CGs for chapter 2. In fact, all the Ch2 CGs are done now.  Even the one that I did and then re-did. Which is the *second* CG that I drew twice.

*stares at Asher and Yren*

But hey. That aside. Look! Sparkles!

I also finally finished drawing Cim's sprite with relatively little screen time in the game as whole. But she did still need a sprite and now she has it for her 30 second appearance in Chapter Two.

Other

The big thing this month is that I released the Episode 1 to the Black Tea Patrons as mentioned - about a week ago (a little less than that but still).

Beta testers have been going through to identify typos and other issues (flowchart not unlocking, pronouns not updating correctly (IE....Esh forgot the brackets), and other stuff.)

When we did the very small (IE...two people) version of testing, we did find a fairly significant issue with the flowcharts not updating properly, and that's probably the biggest error identified so far.

But it's fixed now.

Beyond that it's really been relatively minor typos.

The other biggest issue is probably with some pronouns and verbs not updating with the player's selection because I forgot the brackets around them in the code. 

This is what it's supposed to look like but sometimes I forget the brackets around either the pronoun or the verb, which means it will not appear correctly.

So obviously finding and correcting any of those is important.

Otherwise it's mostly been minor stuff.

Now that this episode is in beta I've actually started doing some of the coding for Episode 2 (IE chapter 3 and chapter 4).

Before I get into the heavier work of coding expressions or doing CG art, there is a lot of smaller work to be done.

Things like adding a transition to the menus or putting in the branching indicator and coding Wil's expressions on the menus in particular.

So I've mostly been working on those smaller things to get them out of the way before getting into bigger things.

I've also gone through the script to mark where I think the CGs should go, which informs what the CGs will actually be of.

Upcoming month(s)

Obviously I'll be continuing to work on Episode 2, ramping up my focus on it as beta for Episode 1 starts to conclude.

And that brings me to the big question people have right now - which is when will the public release of Episode 1 happen? 

I still don't have a real ETA on that.

The beta will last anywhere from 2 - 4 weeks. Beta is one of those things that kind of lasts how long it lasts. And as long as there either aren't many issues or else people go through the content quickly then beta doesn't have to last long. But if there are issues or people are going more slowly through the content (or there's just more content to go through), beta will last longer.

Patreon access (which means from Yellow Tea up) will begin when the beta test corrects slow to a stop.That could be in a week or that could be two weeks.

And then that "early access" stage will last 3 - 4 weeks before I then release to the public. 

With that in mind, the public release of Episode 1 will probably be sometime in early November.

In the meantime I will be continuing to make fixes on Episode 1 and work towards getting Episode 2 up and running.

I will have more information on all of that next month (and a more solid public release date!)

See you then!