v0.3.0 Progress Report #4

Hey everyone

I finished writing the next update and started doing renders 🥳. I'm happy with how it turned out this time around, even though it ended up a bit bigger than expected (yet again).

As I mentioned in the last progress report, this update was tricky to write. I figured out why this was the case and I'll make some changes that will hopefully make things easier in the future. The short version is this: The way I planned out the chapters are counterproductive to the release schedule I want to maintain.

Basically I had planned chapters ahead with lots of notes and assigned scenes to put in. These notes are always pretty vague on purpose, which leaves me lots of freedom when actually writing a scene. But this of course makes it hard to estimate the size of a chapter or even of a scene in advance. Now, chapter 2 was already split in two. The first half was released with v0.2.0, the second half (with all the rest of the planned scenes) was supposed to be the next update. When I was writing the next update I stumbled onto a problem. The rest of the chapter ended up being much bigger than anticipated. Too big for one update. And splitting it again would mess up the pacing and be an unsatisfying experience for the players.

OK, lots of rambling, what's the solution? 👉 I decided to get rid of the chapter structure and do a different approach. Instead of planning out chapters and then try to fit the releases around it, I'll do it the other way around. I basically plan only one release ahead and take as much or little from the queued story beats as necessary. This will ensure that each update will stay roughly the same size and in turn will allow me to be more consistent with release schedules.

To make this change more clear I decided to get rid of the "Chapter" term and from now on will use "Episode" instead. Each update will equal one episode, meaning Episode 1 (v0.1.0) and Episode 2 (v0.2.0) are done and the next update (v0.3.0) will be Episode 3.

That's probably way too much text for something that won't really directly affect you players all that much 😅, but I figured I give you a little insight on what's going on.

All this also had an effect on the Create-a-Side-Character polls that are currently going on for Silver/Gold patrons: Luna will have a short introduction in Episode 3, but her planned main scene is pushed back to a later episode.

And the last thing: as I mentioned, I've started doing renders again. Preview pics will be posted weekly on Mondays for Bronze tier and above. You'll get the first one next week, although this one might arrive late a day or two.

❤️ All right, that's all I think. Enjoy your weekend and thank you for the support! ❤️