Hello everyone!

Summer is finally here, and I hope the changing of the seasons has brought a bit more light back into your life (Literally, if you live in a rain forest like me).

Here’s your project update for June 1st!

First and foremost: The Unity Rebuild is going quite well, the newest test build containing a massive improvement to back-end systems, as well as the new Chapters 20 and 21, has been up for patrons for about a week. I cannot overstate how many important new features exist in this test build that just weren’t there a month ago, most of them should be completely invisible to the reader but things like conditional menu buttons and a more refined flag system are absolutely wonderful new additions for my side of things that allow me to make features like exploration segments far more interesting.

Of course, these big back-end changes required a boatload of dev testing. Last week Snow and I easily put 40 hours of testing in about 3 days, you guys on the Discord got to see that last day live. Now that the new features for the Visual Novel segments are working, our focus is back on combat. 

Our framework is mostly complete (animation control, AI logic, stat tracking, etc) and now it’s just a matter of filling out the new UI and getting this tested as well. No critical blockers have really been found for combat, the delay is really more about all the small scale, busy work sections that keep having to be done for seemingly trivial things.

 Functions need to be able to talk to each other, information in the game has to be able to be read correctly, things like that. While this is certainly much more work than the Ren’py version of combat to build, the result is that we’re going to have a 1st class combat system that we can build fun and interesting encounters with for years. 

Being able to finally show it off to you guys is really exciting for me, so please look forward to that soon™.

Other than that, work has continued on Ch22. Last month I mentioned that Ch22 would likely be as long as Ch20+21 combined (1400 renders)...

Well, it’s actually broken 2000 renders and will likely be above 2500 when I’m completely done. 

If you’ve played Ch21 already (And if you’re a patron, go play it!) you’ll know some real shit is about to go down for Jamie and CJ. I wanted to give this event the spectacle and breathing room it deserves without taking up chapter space that other plotlines will require, so Ch22 is going to be absolutely gigantic.

To put things in perspective, the currently released 1.27 Ren’py build is about 6500 renders. Ch20+21+22 together will be just under 4000. If you haven’t played since the last Ren’py build, the game is going to be nearly double the size it was previously. Lots to look forward to! This chapter will also feature some really fun combat sections that will finally let you sink your teeth into the system and will definitely make Ch15 look like a tutorial (because that’s what it was).

Along with Ch22’s obscene number of new renders will be some awesome new music and the work of our sound designer who has made completely original UI sounds, ambience and other sound effects for the game! I’ll preview some of these in the WIP channel on the Discord, but I’m already floored by how good these came out.

That about wraps it up for now. If you have any questions at all about the project, my door is 100% open. Even if you’re not a patron but are curious about anything, absolutely feel free to DM me either on Patreon, itch, f95 or Discord.

Until next time, take care!

Sincerely,

Story Anon