Weekly update - March 6th

Hi Folks,

It's another slow week of progress I'm afraid. The whole polish activity has definitely impacted my ability to work on new content. The good news is that, that process is all complete now and my focus is 100% now on chapter 7 development. I hope you've all picked up the patched version now, it may not show it to the casual look but a lot of work went into improving the old stuff. New renders were added, a couple of new animations and in some cases a lot of revamp in the dialogue. An example of that would be the coffee meet between Emma and Kim, I added a lot to Kim's background transitioning story.

I hadn't however completely stopped dev on chapter 7, progress was still made this week. I've completed 12 of the 25 scenes now, and halfway through the 13th. Full dialogue is also in place for almost all the scenes now. I do expect a speed up to occur next week and I'm not planning on changing my target date of March 20th, just yet.

I just received my 5th rejection of my store page from Steam yesterday. There seems to be one issue though now that they are focusing in on. For early access they ask that you state how the current build with differ from the final product. In my response I put that there are 6 chapters but there will be 10. They keep rejecting with this: " Please don't make specific promises about future events. For example, there's no way you can know exactly when the game will be finished, that the game will be finished at all, or that planned future additions will definitely happen. Don't ask your customers to bet on the future of your game. Customers should be buying your game based on its current state, not on promises of a future that may or may not be realized." At this point in time I'm at a loss to know how to answer that question, it's like they don't get the concept of a chapter delivery release system. I've bitten the bullet and just resubmitted a more generic response, that I plan to add more chapters, in the hope that, that appeases them. It's frustrating as hell. Good news though that following the polish up exercise, I also made the changes necessary for a Steam build, so I've submitted the build for their approval too, hopefully that approval process is somewhat more straightforward.

As I stated in previous weeks it's almost been 30 days since Chapter 6 dropped so to adhere to my promise to Great Tier Patreons, I will make that available to those of you on that tier on March 10th.

I also plan to put Chapter 6 onto Itch, Chapter 5 did a lot better in terms of sales than the previous 2, still not massive but interest has certainly picked up :) I will not put Chapter 6 up there though until Chapter 7 drops here and it will be priced at $10 as I need to protect prices on other platforms.

I've also answered a questionnaire on the game for potentially putting it up on GoG, they've not got back to me yet and I will need to see how much effort is involved before I weigh up whether to sell it there too. 

Back to chapter 7. As I stated before chapter 7 will tell the story of the rest of year one for our pair. Time will pass somewhat faster than we've seen in past chapters. I could add a bunch of boring scenes that see the characters doing class work or hanging out around the campus but my mantra has always been that there is a purpose behind every scene, some scenes may offer just a hint of what will follow others are major plot paths. I'm hoping folks don't misinterpret this time speed up as me trying to rush to the finish line, it's really not.

OK, I think I have waffled on long enough for this week, please forgive my venting session above. It's just been a challenging process, it's been a month now since my first store page submission, so I just want to be done with it.

Have a great weekend and as always, thank you so much for your continued support and interest, it absolutely means the world to me.

Fae.