Dev Log #25

Hi all! Hope everyone is well! It has been wild release week and reading through some of the critiques has made me decide on a few things that should be done and released alongside E1P2:

- A walkthrough mode (or similar) that details choice outcome and what specific dialogue choices affect in terms of standing with individual characters.

- Add slightly more introspection from Cara after chaotic events instead of having her brush it off quickly and entirely.

- Fix the phone feature to be more robust than it is right now instead of "clunky and at times non-functioning". This fix seems more complicated than I once thought, so I'll be doing more strenuous self-testing on this before the next episode part's release.

Postmortem

A small post-mortem of my development cycle for E1P1 in hindsight is to add more time for debugging/testing before the first release. With my final render complete just 24 hours or less before the first release last week, I was definitely rushed to deliver on the promise of my self-designated release date, at the cost of several refinements (gameplay, images) that I would have wanted.

While this would add to dev-time, it shouldn't take more than 3 days of me just self-testing and running through all possibilities to ensure the quality, fidelity, and functionality of the game are not compromised before releasing.

I'd admit, the months of December and January were huge speedbumps with my necessary absences so I'm honestly very glad that I could pull off the release at the time I specified, so there's that to be happy for!

Looking forward...

For E1P1, I'll be releasing an updated build in one to two weeks which will address known bugs and issues. A separate (restricted) build will also be made ready for Patreon.

Episode 1 Part 2 (E1P2) is well under development as I speak, with the opening scene already completed and rendered. I will be looking to complete the rendering of Day 3 by the end of this week, should everything go smoothly. After which, rendering of Day 4 (and subsequently Days 5, 6, and 7) will continue as planned. E1P2 is the second half of Episode 1.

I will also be resuming work on the custom renders that have been backed up since February and will be looking to deliver those sometime during the 3rd week of March 2023.

Release date...?

Of course, all of those updates are cool and everything but there's always one question that I'm sure is on everyone's minds, which is: What's Episode 1 Part 2's release date?

As always, with game development, it is extremely hard to gauge these things when I only have an opening scene to my name. However, considering I do not have many disruptions for the coming months (except for one week in late April 2023), I can put a baseline release window of sometime between mid-May 2023 and late June 2023. Do understand that this window is highly subjective but as a guarantee, I will not extend the endpoints but only shrink from them (i.e. I won't push it back to July 2023 citing any reason, the episode part will release late June 2023 at the very latest).

With that, that concludes this dev log! Quite a lengthy one, but it will probably be a trend for any dev log that comes after release week.

Have a good day and stay healthy!