The Month Ahead: It's great to be back!

Oh, hello! Didn't see you there! Hope you haven't been waiting long?

Today marks my first day back at work on Sileo after a two and a half week absence which served to reset my tolerance to my medication (which had gotten well out of hand) as well as offer some much needed time off. 

And let me tell ya! If you had asked me back then if I was burned out, I would have denied, but boy oh boy was I! It was great having some time off. If I'm honest, I've actually been really excited to get back to work! I've never felt more eager! That's how you know you're working your dream job, so a huge thanks to all of you for making this possible, and a huge thanks for your patience over these last couple of weeks!

So as promised, this post will serve to keep you guys all up to date on what the plan is for the month ahead. As always, things can and often will change, but I'll let you know if they do.

Development Plan for October

October is thankfully the final month that CurryCatz will be tied up with his other job, coming free at the end of the month. This, combined with the fact that day 18 - 20 are nowhere near as densely packed as 17 is should mean that forthcoming updates are bigger and of a higher quality than they have been as of late! On that note, I apologize for the slower pace. CurryCatz isn't to blame for that, that's all on me. I've been spending far too long on each piece of content and making it all far too dense while polishing it to a standard higher than ever before. Though it may not stand out as it isn't a big plot heavy sequence, I still think the second chapter of Day 17 is the best thing I've written so far. I'm really proud of the level of quality I reached and how it all flows! Hopefully I can maintain that bar of quality and flow going forward, though I still wish to make an active effort to be concise. Chapter 3 Day 17 is my next task and shouldn't take long to finish. It'll also be a trial by fire in being concise... unlike these progress reports. Honestly, it doesn't matter here. I can just rant and rave like I do on my streams because I'm cray cray af yo pulls incorrect and outdated gang signs in a desperate attempt to be hip like the kids

Once 17x3 is done, I'll be pushing forward to try and complete the rest of the day. It's feasible that I will be able to finish Day 17 in the time remaining, though I have a terrible habit of underestimating the time these things can take, so don't quote me on that. Nonetheless, Day 17 has two sex scenes, neither of which have even been sketched yet. CurryCatz will have a few days at the end of the month to draw like crazy so hopefully he'll be able to get everything together in time. We'll see! An issue is that I can't really release anything after chapter 3 isolated from the rest of the day as the remaining chapters all culminate towards something and it would just be a terrible thing to split them up. What I'm thinking is that 17x3 will release come hell or high water, but if the later chapters require more time to finish, we'll delay those and release a second update part way through the month once they're finished. Trust me. You're going to love them! Of course, all going well the entire day 17 will release on the 2nd of November like planned, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Upcoming Characters - Roux and Tobias

Now those of you in our Patreon Discord channel may recall that I posted a preview of a new character who will be appearing on Day 18. There's actually two characters! The first of these is...

Meet Carais Roux, just Roux for short. This is of course a very early sketch of this character and much is subject to change, but I figured you'd  still be interested in a preview!

Roux is a Shiba Inu and the current guitarist in Glenn's version of The Black Claws. He's cool with a capital 'C', wears sunglasses inside and only texts with caps lock on - after all, caps lock is cruise control for cool...

Roux will be making his first appearance on Day 18 and will be appearing in other routes and tales as well. Can't wait to introduce him to you properly!

The second of these new characters is, of course, the long awaited Tobias! He plays a major role in Lukas' route as well as several tales, including the continuation of Tai's route. While his role in the main story section of Tai's route is only small, you'll be seeing a lot more of him in future!

To be forthcoming, CurryCatz wasn't keen on drawing a monkey. I was very keen on drawing one. We tried once before using a particular set of references but what I was hoping to capture simply wasn't something compatible with CurryCatz artstyle and that attempt was scrapped. I've since come up with a totally different design and approach with all new references. CurryCatz has been very hesitant to even start. Truth be told, I was genuinely concerned we'd have to retcon Tobias' species and make him something different, but last night, CurryCatz made another attempt...

He's nailed it! We're still ironing out the details and tweaking things until they're perfect so I'm not going to show you what we have just yet, but believe me, CurryCatz has done an amazing job of capturing my inspiration for this characters aesthetic. He'll be making his debut on Day 18 as planned! Hopefully you guys love him as much as I already do, he's adorable!

Reiterating Our Development Plan

We've talked about this several times already, but just to be sure that everyone is in the loop, I'm going to quickly skim over our plans for the next 6 months~

Our first priority is to finish Tai's route. Ideally I want this done before the end of the year, releasing January 2nd. It's a big job ahead of us and there's a good chance we might not quite make that deadline, but we're going to try. Of course, I don't want to release something subpar just to get it out the door (like I almost did with 17x3 >_>) so if more time is needed, more time we'll take.

Once Tai's route is completed, we'll be beginning work on Diego's Tale which picks up from where his route leaves off on vacation to Seaton where you'll get to meet his family and all that stuff. We don't plan to work on this for longer than 3 months ideally, but same goes, if it needs more time, it'll get more time. If we're lucky, maybe we'll even finish ahead of schedule? (Pfft, yeah right). 

Around the time Tai's final update drops, we'll be putting up a poll asking you all which main route you'd like to see next - either Lukas', or Axel/Dom's. That will be a binding poll, so whichever gets the most votes is what we'll be doing. Work on this will begin once Diego's tale is completed.

We also want to spend a little bit of time finally getting the 0.3X update content wrapped up as there's still a lot of stuff that was planned for 0.30 that I simply never got time to do. We'll probably do something similar to what we did between Diego's route and Tai's route where after Diego's tale, that months dev cycle will be focused on finalizing the details for the new route, adding the first scenes to Day 5 and otherwise focusing on technical stuff. All of this can and probably will change though, so stay tuned. Just a loose plan for now. Who knows? Maybe you'll hit the $3000 milestone in the meantime and we'll have to make another tales route? (Don't worry, next time, there'll be a vote option just to continue with the main stories if that's what you'd prefer)

Streaming

A big thanks to all those who tuned into this months Patreon-exclusive stream and many apologies that it kinda sucked! I was all kinds of tired, a little hung over (ssh) and experienced some major technical difficulties along the way. The good news is I believe I have fixed these issues now and this fix also rectifies the performance issues we experienced during the Spyro stream, so going forward things will hopefully work a lot better! 

Worst case scenario, I have a contingency plan. My new OLED Switch console has arrived to replace my broken old one and I've played a save of Breath of the Wild up to the point where we left off. If things go poorly the next time we stream it, we can simply pick up and continue on actual hardware. I've also opted to swap my CPU for a slightly more sophisticated model (5800X) which will hopefully provide enough of a boost for PS3 emulation - I'd love to play MGS3 HD on stream but the 5600X I have just isn't quite up to snuff - so here's hoping! 

My next stream will be held sometime relatively soon, although I'll be waiting for the new CPU to arrive and with covid, who knows how long that might take. The next stream will be my public debut. Once a date is set, I'll post about it here but going forward from that, I won't be posting stream notifications here on Patreon as to avoid annoying people with them. If you want to be the first to know when I'm going live, there'll be an announcement in our Sileo Discord Server, an announcement on both the Sileo Twitter and my own personal Twitter (follow me!), or you can simply subscribe to my channel on YouTube and click the bell to get notified! Can't wait to see you all there!

Update on Merch etc

Just a quick note to say we haven't forgotten about merch or anything like that. We're simply waiting until CurryCatz is free from his other work before we get the final details ironed out and start making things happen. It's been a weird few months for us as he's been so busy that we haven't really been able to communicate as a team like we usually did, so we're sort of running autonomously with mostly existing plans until the status quo can resume at the end of this month. We'll be starting the process for merch in November but it's hard to say how quickly things will become available for sale, so stay tuned for more on that.

And that's all for now! Thanks for coming to my TED talk! I'm about to get back to it (omgomg can't wait) and expect to have 17x3 finished hopefully within a day or two! What's there is already pretty damn good, there's just one problem section that needs more work and otherwise a lot of polish required to make sure it's as good as it can be. I've already spoiled what this scene is in Discord, so if you're curious, why not head over there and look for my post in Patreon Spoilers? (Make sure to link your account here on Patreon to get access). If you prefer to keep it a surprise... well, be excited. It's gonna be great!