Progress Report 2023.02.15: Veyer Branch Update

Hi friends,

Happy February and Happy (belated) Valentine’s Day! I hope you are all doing well. This is going to be a short progress report as not too much has changed since my last one. I have made a lot of progress on the Veyer branch since the end of January. The Mission Off branch is complete; I am currently about half-way through the Mission On branch. This is a little easier to put together than the former because I have the skeletons for most of the dialogue trees and story beats in other material, it’s just a matter of editing and re-shaping them so they work within the context of this branch’s continuity.

I have three major story beats to finish, and then the Veyer continuity stuff is complete. Once that is finished, my editor and I have a massive amount of content to go through (likely around 250k-300k words, these documents are extremely content dense). Some of it is proofread already, but there’s a lot of ironing out to do before I can get to coding.

Once coding starts, it will likely take me more time than usual to get through all the material as I have to do all my patch edits first. The last public/alpha build patch was in October and I have a list several pages long of various lore edits, bugs fixes, and other changes that have accumulated over the past few months.

I will give a forewarning: when the next patch/update comes out, you WILL have to restart from the beginning. I’ve been avoiding making a change because I didn’t want to wreck players’ save files, but it’s become very difficult to handle the continuity of Aeran and the MC’s relationship without a specific flag. Since the game’s beginning, the player’s original choice of what to set Aeran’s initial approval stat at was never flagged. I’ve now reached a point where the references are getting specific enough that I need to know what option the player chose, which means that the choice needs a flag. This is not something that can be inserted retroactively – players will have to replay from the beginning to ensure that choice is recorded in their playthrough’s variables.

Playing on an old save file after this patch will throw up oddities in Aeran’s dialogue and lock you out of options you should otherwise have. I am also going to be rebalance how his low romance/high approval system works and clean up some other background code things, so I cannot stress enough that a full restart is the only way to ensure that your playthrough is as smooth and bug-free as possible.

And finally, just as a reminder, bonus content and side story content is on hold until I finish Episode 3 Part 1 in its entirety. This means there will likely be a few more months without new entries for these benefits, but you can still access the backlog through the bonus content and short story tags if you haven’t already! I am very sorry for that, but I am currently not able to work on additional content while I am working through this section of the game.

Other News

Patreon is rolling out a change to their Discord integration this month. Wayfarer Patron server access and roles are exclusively for active patrons. This means that when you de-pledge, the bot will remove your role and you will lose access to the server automatically. You may also temporarily lose access if your payments are invalid, so I would recommend checking them to make sure everything is fine there.

If you encounter issues as this change is rolled out, please don’t hesitate to message me and I can help you troubleshoot.

As always, thank you all so much for your support. 💕