Livestream Oct 11 and Firebreak Development Sprint 1 Begins

NOTE [Edited to Update the Livestream Date to Oct 11 (Saturday) as I got the dates mixed up on the OP.]

As stated in the title, we'll host our next official livestream and AMA on Saturday Oct 11 at 5:00PM UTC. As always, Xor of Thunderline Studios has graciously offered to emcee for us, and we'll take both spontaneous questions from the chat as well as those frontloaded into our #questions-for-dev-streams channel in Discord.

As usual, the Livestream will be hosted in Discord, so if you want to pick Stoya or Kentyrr's brain on any VN topic at all, we hope to see you there. Also as usual, we will record the stream and post it in our Youtube channel for those who wish to get caught up offline.

Secondly, the developers met in person for the first time last weekend, and got an opportunity to sit down and hammer out the details of our next game, Firebreak. There have been a lot of questions in chat, and so I'll try to answer a few of them here before the Livestream so they can help inform deeper questions there.

• Firebreak was foreshadowed in Chasing Sunsets and takes place in the same "universe."

• Many secondary characters from CS will have more central roles in Firebreak.

• We will have a greater number of love interests with full paths...Between 8 and 10.

• While there is a sci-fi angle to the plot, it will NOT take place in space...Mostly.

• The title "Firebreak" is a reference to a technology central to the plot.

• There will likely be cameos from principal characters in Chasing Sunsets.

• While nothing has been negotiated yet, it seems likely that there may be crossovers with other titles.

• Our intent is to create an intriguing story that is not a slow-burn like CS with more LI variety.

• While there will be no controversial kinks like incest, the story will be significantly less "vanilla" than CS.

• We do not have a set number of chapters in mind. We will develop the game as long as the story demands.

Here is fairly spoiler-free synopsis:

"Enlisted by DARPA to research life support systems for a planned manned mission to the asteroid belt, something goes horrifically awry with one of the technologies Polygene has developed to mitigate many of the challenges associated with long-duration spaceflight. Disoriented and suffering from partial amnesia, you must unravel what went wrong and how to save the lives of everyone caught up in the failure cascade. Just be careful not to lose yourself in the process. "

We're very excited to get started on bringing another story to life for our patrons!

That said, there are a few things changing.

The $1 tier will remain, and patrons will continue to have access to Chasing Sunsets indefinitely. This tier will NOT grant access to Firebreak when it releases, and will instead become available at the $5 tier. This is a decision we have wrestled with for a long time, and we felt it wasn't fair to move the goalposts while CS was still in development. Making this change for Firebreak with the announcement well in advance of the first content drop seemed like the right time. We'll keep an eye on how Firebreak is received and subscription patterns to determine if additional tier tweaking makes sense.

As you can see, the tier names have already been updated to reflect their new Firebreak equivalents and all other artwork both in Discord and on subscription sites will soon be update to reflect our new development focus.

As for Steam, it sounds like Early Access may be going away, and if that's the case, it will likely force Firebreak to be sold in Season format. We will do everything we can to avoid this, as we find the practice distasteful, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Lastly, the Chasing Sunsets v1.10b beta is being worked on and hopefully pretty close to complete. I did get a build out, but it was missing about half the fixes that had been earmarked, and I was able to figure out why this weekend. It will take a few days to reincorporate them, but once that is done our testers will be able to validate the changes, and we'll push to all platforms.

Once again, this is the Ch0 - Ch10 bugfix, but NOT the remaster. There is no new art, but there are some branches that would not trigger before because of variable errors, etc. I cannot say for certain at this point if v1.10b will break saves. I will post it to Steam in Public Beta channel before merging it with the main branch when the time comes just in case.

For now, get your questions front loaded in our Discord channel and we'll look forward to talking with you all about the closing chapter of Chasing Sunsets and the development of the opening chapter of Firebreak in more detail!

As always, thanks for your support and we can't wait to show you what we've got cooking next!