Everstone Daycare - Progress Report (Dec. 22, 2022)

Edit: Reposted because I forgot to attach the screenshots. Whoops!

Howdy everyone! Happy holidays! Just a progress report on what we’ve been working on so far.

I apologize for the slow month. It’s mostly been a lot of holiday related issues that’s been keeping us from working as much as we’d like to. Just to clarify more from the previous post about what exactly is happening with me in particular, let me just explain my situation outright:

From the 20th until the 3rd of January, I’ll be going back to my folks’ for the holidays. That means I’ll be away from my usual setup, preventing me from drawing, programming, and writing, or at least being able to do so in a work-conducive environment (same as last year and probably in the coming years as well). I’m able to buy a small travel laptop thanks to the support of all you patrons and bring it with me, so writing isn’t completely off the table and I’ll do my best to work on the story with the time I have. I don’t think I’ll be able to release a demo anymore in this state however.

As for the work we have been able to do this past month, it’s mostly been a lot of writing and setting up for the overall story. We decided to plot out point-by-point each event that will happen from the start of the second day until the end of the third day for the “main” ending, instead of winging it and writing as we went along while we were still getting all the details ironed out. We had a general idea of how we wanted the story to go, but now we have a clear plan and writing in the future should go a bit smoother. This is a big and important step that took us some time to agree on, but we’ve settled on a story that we all like. I’d go into more detail, but I’d rather not spoil everything that’s still to come.

What prompted us to finally decide on getting this all ironed out is not only that we really should’ve done it way earlier, but also that we’re considering working with guest writers to add optional kinky scenes to the game in the future. We wanted to make sure we knew every plot point so we can determine what spaces were available and at what points in the story we could slot in these scenes. I’ll keep the details light on this one for now as well until we have something to actually show, but we have something involving this in the works at the moment.

Tennet and Spooky have been working on polishing up the title screen background. We wanted it to be reminiscent of the way the old Season 1 Pokemon anime watercolor their backgrounds and they’re currently working out how to replicate that style. A WIP of the image is posted above if you want to see our current progress. Tennet will unfortunately also be slowed down by his holiday plans as Christmas draws closer as he’s also traveling away from his usual computer to spend the holidays elsewhere.

I’ve also added a small indicator above the minimap that shows you the name of the room you’re currently in, both for easier navigation, and to make it simpler for me to explain how to get to any new scenes in the future (A screenshot of it is also available above). We’ve also changed, or rather, finalized a lot of the names of the rooms to make them more fitting and immediately understandable. I plan to post an updated map once I’m back home. Here’s just the 3 major changes we decided on:

Nap Room -> Bedtime Room - You don’t really end up doing a lot of napping in that room and your first experience is actually just sleeping overnight there.

Change Room and Change Room #2 -> Changing Room and Bedtime Changing Room – We’ve been referring to the changing rooms beside the Playroom as the Change Room and the one beside the Nap Room as Change Room #2, both names not really being good indicators of which is which, which is the reason why in the previous demos, I’ve referred to Change Room #2 as ‘The changing room beside the nap room’. Now it should be more obvious which is which.

Baby Supplies -> Retraining Supplies Room – Not a room that’s been featured in the game yet, but it would make more sense that “baby” would be a term that’s used more colloquially around the daycare rather than for any serious decisions when naming rooms.

Overall, I think we’ve done some pretty important work with the setting up of the story. Unfortunately, we haven’t made much that’s easy to show off in a demo so far, so I apologize for that. I thank you all again for your continued support, even during this holiday season. I’ll try to work even harder next year to be more worthy of everyone’s support!

Happy holidays everyone! I hope the rest of everyone’s December and their celebrations go well!

TLDR: I’m at my parents’ for the holidays until Jan 3, so work has been slow. Entire plot and story has been ironed out. Possibility of us working with guest writers to include optional scenes written by them across the game. Tennet and Spooky are still polishing the title screen to get it as similar to the early Pokemon anime as we’d like. Lastly, we’ve changed a few things about the minimap and added a new bit of UI to tell you the name of the room you’re in.