Progress Update, ETA, and Behind the Scenes

Hi all! It's been a busy past few days and I have lots of little things to report.

Progress Update and ETA

I have about 70 lines of script to create images for, and then a few more images lacking any narrative or dialogue. When I had fewer demands on my time, I'd have been able to crunch through 70 lines of script in a day, but it was a hard push even then. I'm guessing this will be finished and released in about a week to complete (including audio and QC testing), so we're looking at a mid-April release. I might be able to push this out sooner, but we'll see.

BtS: New Logo

A huge thank you to everyone who gave input and voted on the recent poll. I have gone ahead and purchased a new logo, which has already been rolled out across multiple websites. There is a core logo for what I'm calling Bound by Night Game Studio, and then there is the Bound by Night Visual Novel.

You'll also see I've modified the logo a little in the header image for this post to better reflect the visual novel. Change isn't always easy, but on the whole I think this is an improvement.

BtS: Quality of Life and Technical Updates to BBN

I've been working with a graphic artist to completely revamp the GUI for BBN. I don't think that will be ready before the next release but, as we've been working with that, I've been incorporating some other items that have been on my "to do" list. Specifically, I'm adding a music room or jukebox in which you can play select tracks that you can hear in the game, and I've also added a loading progress bar.

The music room has already been added and is working. Unfortunately, I have to manually add tracks to do it, just like I have to manually add images for the gallery, so it's a little extra work, but this has been an often requested feature and I'm glad to finally be rolling it out. I did some testing of it in the sandbox game I've been messing around with, liked how it worked, and figured it was ready for BBN.

On the progress bar, I realized I would sometimes click on BBN to run it and, after a few seconds and nothing had opened yet, I wasn't sure if it was loading or not. This progress bar should help address any ambiguity on that for others.

Unfortunately, both of these are currently limited to PC and Mac users; Android presents additional complications and challenges on screen real estate, but I will try to add these to Android when I can.

I'm also updating the splash screens to reflect the new logo and theme, and am also looking at an update to the very beginning of the prologue that currently just has the pale blue skyline. I haven't decided exactly what I want to do with that yet, and it may or may not make it into the next update, but it's all part of giving you a better and more polished experience.

That's about it for now! I've got more sneak peek images to share with you but will probably post those closer to the weekend.

Cheers!