Progress Report 2022.04.03: March Wrap Up & Spring Development Plans

Hi friends,

Happy April!

The last two weeks have been frighteningly busy and challenging, to say the least. Aside from some personal stuff (family members in the hospital, my partner’s family contracting Covid—everyone’s fine, but it was a little stressful for a time), I’ve been crunching pretty hard to get Episode 2 finished. Last progress report I mentioned doing a reassessment of how far away I am from an update and with the new batch of material I’ve finished, I think I have a much better idea of how things are going.

April & May Development

As of right now, Scene 4 is (mostly) complete. The main dialogue branches are finished, along with the 5 possible endings that lead into Scene 5. The document still needs to be fully edited and proofread, and the drunk!MC continuity needs to be added in, but the bulk of it and the most complex parts to write are finished.

Scene 5 (the last scene!) has been started and broken down into its different components. There are essentially one major section and four choice-dependent branches within this scene:

• Common section with Aeran that all players will encounter
• Branch A with Phaedra
• Branch B with Melchior
• Branch C with [Redacted Character]
• Branch D with Aeran

If everything goes according to plan and I actually take my weekends where I should, April’s development will look like this:

• April 4-8: Draft common section, finished Scene 4 edits and send to editor
• April 11-15: Phaedra branch and Melchior branch
• April 18-22: [Reacted Character] branch and Aeran branch, write monthly bonus content
• April 25-29: Finish Scene 5 edits, add in drunk!MC continuity and send to editor

This will leave the first week of May for final edits and coding. Typically transferring content into the game and coding it does not take a lot of time. Unlike the January update (which had multiple locations for the player to visit and the interactive map to handle), there isn’t a lot of complex coding that needs to happen. It’s mostly copy/pasting text into the editor and handling continuity flags.

I want to have Episode 2 finished and the alpha build updated by May 7, if not sooner.

Once the update is out, I’ll be working on finalizing Episode 2 concurrently with developing Episode 3.

Episode 2 Finalization

The episode needs to be fully playtested before it can go for public release. I also need to finish writing all of the codex entries that are triggered in this episode.

Episode 3 Development

Episode 3 used to be the final scene of Episode 2 until I broke it off to have it be its own thing. This was a structural decision that will probably make a lot of sense once the rest of Episode 2’s material is available. Episode 3 is short and action-heavy, and I am redoing the outline to streamline its content as I really don’t want it to push much more than 50k words of cumulative content.

Because I can’t release Episode 2 publicly until Episode 3’s alpha is finished, drafting its material is really important in May and June. Ideally, I would like to finish Episode 3 by the end of June so I can launch Episode 2 before I go on my July hiatus. Depending on how work progresses, I may need to take a break from making bonus content during May and June so I can get the episode finished.

July Hiatus

As mentioned on my 2022 roadmap, I am taking a month-long break during July. Because I won’t be working actively on the game, I am planning on releasing bonus posts throughout the month. Because I won’t have internet access for most of the month, these will have to be prepped in advance and queued for release. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to create yet, but I’m brainstorming post ideas that will be alternatives to anything writing intensive (short stories are, unfortunately, out of the picture).

I want to get Episode 1's full walkthrough out in July (right now only one third of it is available), but I’m not entirely sure when I’ll have time to work more on that.

Other Updates

I opened a new round of playtester applications for the month of April. If you’re interested, there’s more details on my public development blog here.

I am also working on my Twine template and guidebook and I’ve started posting tutorials as bonus content on Patreon. In all likelihood, this will become a year-long project since I won’t be able to finish everything I want to do for it by the end of the summer.

Spring’s going to be exceptionally busy, but fingers-crossed that everything will work out on time! As always, thank you all so much for your support! 💕