6.0 - Up In The Air

Greetings everyone!

It with a heavy heart and a full belly that I write to you all today. If you're reading this message, it means I am no longer on this earth, having ascended above the Heavens and into the Great Beyond...

...Until we land for a brief layover in San Diego then it's non-stop for Narita International Airport.

Yep, I'm going on vacation and, yep, it's going to affect development for the month of September. I'll be spending the next two weeks traveling across Japan with my best friend before returning to the harsh reality that is, um, reality. This trip's been 10 years in the making and I can't possibly convey how excited I am to finally be going on it!

But What About The Company?

Well, I'm going to be honest with you. For the remainder of the month there will be no pre-alpha builds, no releases, and light development blogs. I'll be checking in at The Company Discord (found HERE) whenever I have downtime, but being a one-man shop, there won't be any real advancement this month. Do with this information as you like, knowing I'll be back to the usual routine on October 1st.

So What Do We Get?

Just because content isn't getting released this month doesn't mean it's not getting worked on on the back end! The writing for Chapter 3 is nearing completion at which point implementation shouldn't take too much time. With that, I wanted to take some time to talk about the state of the game as it is, and what's to come!

State of the Game

With the addition of Sophie's content, I would at this point consider Chapters 1 and 2 to be more or less finished.

I want to go back and clean up some code, convert some repeated actions over to functions, and add some improvements to Julia's actions in Chapter 2, but for the most part the game's where I want it to be at this point.

Existing Content Bullet-points

• Breadth of content is where I want it to be
• Chris is slated to get a character refresh, including a new actor. His characteristics will remain the same, and he will remain non-transformable for now
• Julia's Chapter 2 content is slated to be cleaned up a little. The game's not meant to be difficult by any means, but it shouldn't be SO glaringly obvious where the chapter's going from the get-go either
• I plan on adding more conversations to the pool with every update, and looking at ways to purge conversations from the pool when they're no longer relevant
• Room exploration will not be getting expanded. It sounded like a great idea but in practice it proved uninterested and too difficult to develop meaningful content for
• I'm still not 100% happy with the serum system, or the rate at which you're able to dose people. I don't have any plans to change anything at this time, but it is something I'm keeping an eye on
• The code needs a major once-over. Nothing that would change anything on the front end, but there's a lot of unused functions and images. This would save on back-end processing as should even reduce the image pack size!

I'll go into these points in detail as development continues, but for now this should paint a pretty good picture of where we currently stand. While I could take the time to put out a 5.5 maintenance update, I think most of these points can be worked on in parallel with upcoming content.

Speaking of upcoming content, let's look towards the future with some more bullets.

Chapter 3 and Beyond Bullet-Points

• Currently, I'm planning on having the game conclude at the end of Chapter 5
• At that point, players will be given an ending and epilogue based on their decisions and actions made throughout the game
• Chapter 3 will introduce two new major characters, and give players their first look into The Company HQ
• Chapter 3 is expected to last over a month in game time
• Yes, I'm planning an in-game Halloween event
• Chapter 3 will see the addition of optional timed events. These events run in the background and it's up to you whether or not you want to engage in them
• Similarly, you can expect to be presented with more binary choices which will have an impact on your relationships, content options, and endings
• Both of those concepts will be applied to Chapter 1 and 2 where applicable
• Chapter 3 will give a lot of screen time to Sophie and Tasha, though all characters will be getting fleshed out more for the new content
• This includes Chris, who will show up for story events!
• I don't plan on adding any new game mechanics in Chapter 3
• Once released, the MCS-X unlock event will likely be moved to the end of Chapter 3
• The shop clerks at the mall haven't been forgotten. Expect more content with them in the future. The long term intention is that the mall will be another location where random events, conversations, and serum events can occur

Hopefully that gives everyone a good idea of where things are going in a broad sense. Next week, I'll be posted a more in-depth preview of Chapter 3, as well as some new character introductions!

That's it for this week. As always, thank you all for your continued feedback and support!