Development update 0.02.1 - release date soon
Added 2025-01-07 18:42:45 +0000 UTCHello!
Happy New Year! I hope you’re all doing great.
A lot has happened, and 2025 looks incredibly promising. As you’ll see, version 0.02.1 is a small quality-of-life-focused release, but 0.03 is coming very soon.
Shortly after releasing 0.02, I received some feedback regarding certain aspects of the game, such as pacing, voice acting, and menu navigation.
While working on version 0.03, I decided to incorporate some features to address these concerns. However, I quickly realized that the number of changes was becoming too large for a single release. As a result, I decided to approach it this way to better understand and evaluate your feedback on the changes.
Changes
Guiding and Goals System: An exclamation mark will now appear to indicate when a relevant event is available with a certain character. Honestly, after implementing this feature, I can’t imagine the game without it.
Working Feature: In addition to new scenes and animations, you will now gain XP after working. This XP will help improve your efficiency. The more efficient you become, the more money you’ll earn.
Tutorials: A couple of tutorials have been added to the game to explain some basic features.
New Day Times: The day cycle now has six parts instead of three. These are: Morning, Morning+, Evening, Evening+, Night, and Night+.
New Player Bedroom and Outfit-Changing Option: Later in the game, I’d like to include more custom backgrounds, and the new player bedroom is one of them. With this addition, you can now change outfits from the bedroom. This allows you to see characters wearing different outfits right from the start, once the intro is completed.
New Cafe Date for Amy: The cafe has been replaced with a better one, as it will play a bigger role in the story. Both the interior and exterior will appear later in the game. With this update, Amy’s cafe event and dates have been reworked.
New UI for the Dates Menu: The placeholder menu for dates has been replaced. Additionally, a popup now appears whenever you unlock a date.
New Rose Intro and Office: Rose’s previous office was quite poor, so I gave her a proper one. Her intro and scenes have also been reworked.
New Date Variations: Lucy and Amy are each receiving two new dates to add more variety to your experience. Each character will have a new "hangout" date and a "cafe" or "bakery" date.
New Animated Backgrounds: The office background now includes animation effects to enhance the overall visual quality of the game.
Pacing and Game Speed Balancing: Artificial pauses during scenes have been removed. You can now progress through scenes at your own pace.
New Dialogue Sounds and Voice Removal: Voices were becoming unmanageable due to development costs, with nearly 1,000 files created for just a couple of versions. Additionally, I realized it’s better to add voices once the game is finalized. Apart from this, the general feedback on the AI-voices was negative, so they’ve been replaced with dialogue sounds. These can be enabled or disabled via the voice sound slider and are easier to iterate and improve in the future.
Reduced "Under Development" Barriers: Many options in the game were hiding an "under development" message behind them. These have been significantly reduced to eliminate unnecessary noise.
Code Optimization: Over 7,000 lines of code have been removed. Adding new characters and level variations is now much simpler. If someone wanted to mod the game and add a new character, it should be relatively easy 😉. As part of this update, the entire game's code has been reworked, especially to integrate the new dialogue sounds.
New Title and Sinful Plum Logo: As the name suggests, the title and logo have been updated, and I think they look much better now.
Release
The release is coming soon, depending on my availability to provide support and test that all systems and code are working correctly.
It will likely be around mid-January, possibly between the 16th and 19th. I’ll confirm the exact date soon :).
Thank you so much for your patience, support, and for being here ❤️.
As you’ve seen, there are many changes, and I'm not even mentioning some of the smaller ones! Let me know what you think! We’ll talk again soon for the release.
~Sinny
