Update on 0.7.1

Hey guys,

As some of you know, some of the team members were affected by Hurricane Irma, which made things really difficult for us in the past week.  I'm happy to say that everybody's ok, and we are back to work.

We're starting to buckle down in our new format and working together as a team.  With this new format, we are able to do something we've never been able to do before, and give you guys actual release dates!   Our new workflow now enables us to bring a new release on average of every two weeks for Alpha versions and every week for Beta versions.  So that means two to four updates per month!

0.7.1 will be a new Alpha version that will be heavily focused on adding new story.  It has a tentative scheduled release date of 9/22/17, and the we are hoping to push 0.7.2 to Beta on 9/29/17.

I've read a lot of comments with people complaining about the lack of story updates in 0.7.0.  I'd like to point out and reiterate that this is by design.  We never planned to have 0.7.0 chock full of new story, and if you read our past announcements, we were very vocal about this.  The story content is always mostly updated in the second Alpha of each series.  This was true for all past releases as well.  That being said, 0.7.1 will mostly be focusing on adding new story, and we will also start casting voice actors for the new characters.

Look guys, it's impossible to add new story without the tools to write new story.  New characters are being added to the game so that we can utilize them in the upcoming stories.  The new mechanics in the game are also being optimized so the stories can flow seamlessly and without issues, and we also addressed many major game-breaking bugs in the last build.  All of this gives us a canvas for creating new and better stories.

We *could* just keep shoveling new story on top of the system that is already in place, but it would eventually collapse on itself.  A lot of work goes into a lot of aspects of this project, and we are coming at it from many angles.  That being said, there will be some updates that are mostly about fixing issues and enhancing the core mechanics of the game, and there will be other updates that are mostly about adding story.  They will balance each other out in the long-run, but if we only focus on story and ignore the game, the bugs will just keep piling up, and we don't want that.