Release IV // Chapters 9 & 10

Release IV is here!

Release IV contains two chapters, two bios, 3 CGs, and two music tracks.

It also contains a fix for the "Casefile" menu screen. In Release III the casefile menu screen was available from the options menu right away, "spoiling" the first mystery a little. I also fixed a problem where if you opened the casefile menu screen during a mystery and went back to playing, the casefile would remain on that old mystery, which is obviously not ideal.

Speaking of fixes, there's a small fix regarding Detective 772's name. Previously, it was saved as a persistent variable, which meant that if his name changed, but you loaded an old save, in the old save he would still have his new name. That no longer will happen. This fix will not corrupt your old saves, but his name will appear as "Detective ???" unless you replay the chapter from the beginning.

Starting from Release III, the backgrounds will be in .jpg format, not .png anymore. This will cut down a lot on file size. At some point I'm planning to go back and reformat the first few chapter backgrounds, but I didn't have time.

Now, as for the upcoming Release V...  Chapter 11 is very short and doesn't even contain a mystery, but I'm deliberately keeping the workload small because Release VI is going to be the biggest one yet.

So far everything's been on schedule. I did have a few dips in motivation, but the deadlines manage to bring me back. It's almost three weeks in, which means I created five chapters in three weeks. Now, that's not terrible, but this is a story with one hundred chapters, which means I am now exactly 10% done. If you do the math, it takes 62 weeks to make all the chapters at that rate, which is a little over a year. I'm used to making long projects, and Broken Minds took two years, so I'm not too worried about that. But what would be ideal for me, since I have lots of other projects too, is for it to take no longer than a year, which I think is doable, especially since the mystery chapters start to thin out a little towards the middle. But, we'll see. What would be ideal is to keep my average rate at five chapters per three weeks or higher. But we'll see what happens, and I'll have much more data once the month of July is over!

-- LockedOn