ViM Studios: Dev Log 24-Jun-2022

Wow! What a week it has been. We are totally blown away by the reception that Prince of Suburbia V0.7 has received! June has already become a record-breaking month in terms of Patrons and Itch.io downloads and the month isn't even over!

Within our own team, we often call Prince of Suburbia our "little game that could." There have been many ups and downs in its development. Many fans have stuck with us through all the drama, and a handful of haters doubted we'd ever make it this far. ;) But here we are, and we are so excited about how much our little game has grown!

Prince of Suburbia

Now that V0.7 is officially released, we took some time this week to step back and talk as a team about the future of the game. Being ~70% of the way through the story, it was time to take our big-picture ideas for the remainder of the game and actually start nailing down the details.

One change of plans to note is that the next update of Prince of Suburbia has become big enough that we're making it V0.8 (instead of V0.75 as we've referred to it in the past).  This is to stay consistent with our convention of numbering releases based on the approximate percentage completed.

We plan to stick to the same 2-3 month release cycle that we've gotten so much positive feedback about, so no changes there. However, we wanted to be transparent that the version numbers (percentage completed) will be different than what was previously announced.

Prince of Suburbia - New Tentative Release Schedule

V0.8 (currently in development) - August/September 

V0.9 - October/November

V0.95 - December/January

V1.0 - March/April

V1.? (epilogue/additional content) - Summer 2023 and beyond, based on fan support

As of right now, we hope to be wrapping up the main story of the game (V1.0) by next spring, but we have no plans to say goodbye to these characters until the fans are ready!

Development of V0.8 is already in full swing as you can see on our progress tracker. Sarah was the winner of the extra animation for V0.8 and we currently have a Patreon/SubscribeStar poll running for what the animation will be!

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A Shot in the Dark

Even though Prince of Suburbia has been the main focus the past few weeks, we are still making steady progress with A Shot in the Dark. As you can see, the writing and renders for the first half of Chapter 2 (V0.15) are almost complete, with coding and animations not far behind.

We've also added progress bars for the music and Photogram content. We felt like the work on those aspects was not being captured by other categories, but they do take a significant amount of time! Most of the development of Chapter 2 these past two weeks has been in those two areas.

Next week, we will have some polls, sneak peeks, and behind-the-scenes content for Chapter 2 which will be available only to our Patrons/Subscribers. 

We are still on track for a July/August release of V0.15 and will do our best to get the second half of Chapter 2 (V0.2) out as quickly as possible after that!

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To all the fans that have been with us for years, to the fans that have just discovered us, and to everyone in between -- THANK YOU. Your support and feedback are what make this all worthwhile. 

-TheOmega, Josselyn Stark, & auxiliaryout