stonefoxstudios

Chasing Sunsets - Chapter 7 is in Post Production

As always, the closer we get to release, the more frequent the updates become.

This is just a brief description of where we are as of tonight April 23.

Progress this week:   

• Sound and Music - Complete
• Points and Pathing - Complete
• End of Chapter Summaries - Complete
• Proofreading - Complete
• Unlocks - Complete

Remaining:

• Approximately 254 renders
• Continued dialogue refinement
• Minor feature art - Scene/Achievement/Image Thumbnails
• Steam Localization

The long pole item remains the art, but Kent has been averaging 30 images a day on the more difficult of the two scenes.   

There are 126 images left in that one, but only 64 of those require the extra effort the previous 220 have required.   

The second scene should be far easier from a posing perspective to wrap up the remaining 128 renders, and as such it should go much more quickly.

The still render inventory for Chapter 7 looks to weigh in at about 2019 renders when the last one comes off the render box.

Doing the math, if we maintain this pace, we are 8.5 days from release.   That said, I believe our pace will increase as the scene complexity diminishes into the last few days. 

Anyway, the finish line is in sight, and Kent and I are ready for a few days downtime.   We're as anxious to get Chapter 7 into your hands as you are to mash the download link!

Chasing Sunsets Ch7: Binary out to proofreaders!

And here we go!

While Kent is still burning the midnight oil to fill in the last bits of art, the script is complete and the chapter is playable front to back.   

With that milestone achieved, the first playable binary has been compiled and is out to proofreaders to look for errors in the narration and dialogue.

This brings us to "what's left to do."

• End of Chapter Summary
• Achievements and Scene/Image Unlocks
• Sound/Music
• The bits of art left on Kent's plate
• Various fit and finish items and dialogue refinement

That list is going to shrink very quickly over the coming few days.

We're starting to feel comfortable with a projected release date, and we're shooting for April 30.   If we miss that date, it won't be by much on either side.

The next few weeks are always super crazy as we squash bugs, shore up weak dialogue, and make sure all of the math adds up.   The next post will be to announce beta testers are digging in, followed by the official release for patrons and Steam customers on the same day.

As always, thanks for bearing with us while we do our thing!   The wait is almost over.

Chasing Sunsets Chapter 7: Beta Soon!

With Spring, uh...Springing, we're tearing into the final stretch here with our development cycle.

This week I will be working on feature integration, achievements, and refining dialogue while Kent goes ham on the remaining art.

Over half of the animations are complete, and so far are turning out to be the best yet.

The three scenes with remaining art are are roughly the same size, so after the first one is complete, I'll feel comfortable projecting a release date.

As of right now, the chapter is playable from front-to-back with three scenes (and associated animations) pending, and the triggers missing for points and unlocks.   Sound and music are outstanding as well.

This stuff tends to fall into place relatively quickly at the tail end of the development cycle, so nothing here has me worried other than the normal pre-release jitters.

More updates soon!

Hosting and Content Distribution Updates

All,

This is just a quick housekeeping update:  I wanted to share a bit about what to expect for content delivery when Chapter 7 goes live.

As Chasing Sunsets has met and exceeded the Mega 5GB download limit for free accounts, and pirate sites have grown increasingly unscrupulous about bandwidth theft, we've been forced to reevaluate options for content distribution that will prioritize your launch day access.

We've identified an S3 cloud host that should offer rapid download speeds globally without inconveniencing players with download limits.   In fact, it's live already!

Further, we've partnered with Itch.io to act as our distribution front end for Patreon. Don't worry, this portal works even you do not have an Itch account.

You will notice there is now a single download link in the stickied post and welcome note.   This will validate your membership before directing you to a personalized download link:

While we're under no illusion this will have any effect on piracy, it should ensure you're not competing with non-supporters for release day access to the latest content.

We will announce our Subscribestar solution on that site when it is finalized.

We've partnered with Imatag for passive proliferation awareness, but we have no plans to add active DRM, nor will our software ever transmit data (anonymized or otherwise) back to the mothership for any reason.   (The sole exception being SteamAPI for Achievements and platform integration.)

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to ping us below or in Discord.

Thanks!

Stone Fox Studios

Chasing Sunsets Chapter 7 Dev Update #6

"Oh look Jaye...Stone Fox dropped the ball again."

Hey all, just checking back in with a quick update.

We're still stitching "all the things" together for Chapter 7, and the truth is Kent still has a couple of scenes left to pose.   Not super small ones either.  

The first animation work has come off the presses, and is looking really solid, and we don't anticipate animation delivery being our last box to check.

Unfortunately, we did hit a bit of a speed bump due in part to a family emergency on Kent's side.   Everything's alright, and it's behind us now, but it did slow us down more than we would have liked.  

This will, sadly, push our release out a few more weeks.

I know this isn't welcome news, and I can only offer that our slip will be weeks rather than months.  Sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, we fall short of the goals we set for ourselves.

In any case, the silver lining is that this chapter has quite a bit going on with bad endings, chickens coming home to roost, and subplots starting to wrap up.

I expect we'll have the entire script playable front-to-back by the end of this coming weekend, and at that point will just be backfilling art, tweaking audio, and path testing.

Just as a refresher, we're looking at:

• Approximately 2000 of Kent's tasty renders
• All new Puggy animations
• Side girl content (without leaving out our two main LIs)
• At least two ways to get a bad ending
• New exclusive music
• At least two crossovers with other popular titles in the AVNCU
• 14 new achievements
• Moar pop culture references

Thank you for bearing with us.   We hate announcing delays as much as you hate reading about them.   As always, we'd rather take the goodwill hit here than by releasing something that's not quite ready for prime time because we rushed.

Our next update should be announcing beta testing has begun.

Once we release to beta, we'll begin building our credits movie, and always we'll give patrons a chance to opt out.

Best,

Kentyrr and Stoya

Chasing Sunsets Dev Update #5

It's that time again, and seeing the finish line in sight always makes it easy to forget the housekeeping and admin that goes along with development.

Kent and I are wrapping up the last few scenes now for artwork, and we've begun the animation handoff.

We're sitting at about 1400 images rendered, with five scenes of various length to go, making this by far our most ambitious update to date.   The chapter is playable as of now to the midway point, with plenty of art pending integration...In other words, we're both busy, and I'm not waiting on Kent.

So far, we're very happy with how things are coming together.

Those of you who have been with us for a while will notice some changes under the hood too.

The quick menu and stats bar, which were previously toggles are now adjustable in the settings menu to be either "always shown," "always hidden" or "mouseover."

I've also begun laying the groundwork for "Walkthrough Mode," though it may not launch with Chapter 7, depending on how many hits we have to roll with between now and launch.

Further, some quality fixes and other improvements are going into the preceding chapters as well.

Per usual, as we get closer to a release date, updates should become a bit shorter, but more frequent until we're out of beta test.

We're looking forward to starting our Spring off on the right foot with an update that hopefully feels a little longer and offers some rewards on nearly every path.

Thanks to all who attended and submitted questions to our Feb Livestream.   Kent and I always have a blast with those, and are grateful to Xor for continuing to host them.

Chapter 7 starts the dominoes falling for the endgame in earnest, and the sun begins setting on our protagonists' time on Tonalu.

Kent and I are super excited to see our vision unfolding into its third act, and as always, we couldn't be happier to have all of you along for the ride.

Chasing Sunsets: Chapter 7 Dev Update 4

Kent and I are starting to feel the rush as the pieces fall into place for the next instalment in our story.   Rather than deal in vagaries, I'll use this update to detail a little of what you can expect.

• Two possible game-overs
• Four separate lewd scenes, most of which involve new partners
• New original and exclusive music
• One major character will be leaving the story
• Not one, but TWO crossovers with other popular VNs.

So, the real question on everyone's mind is "Update when?"   We are shooting for late March, but we still have a lot to do.   As the story becomes more complex, we obviously have to account for all of the possible paths so we don't leave anyone hanging.

At the same time, we've posed and rendered the bulk of the chapter so far.   I've begun the integration phase, where I'm refining dialogue and narration, calculating points, and validating path logic.   From an art perspective, it's mostly lewd scenes that remain, and locking down some time with Puggy for animations.

This is a critical chapter for us from the story perspective, with a lot of beats we need to land just right.   We'll be looking to our beta team for frank and honest feedback on what succeeds and what requires refinement.

Chapter 7 should be relatively even in length no matter what path you're on, with variations on how the story beats play out.   That said, it's trending toward our longest chapter by a fair margin, so that in conjunction with December being a holiday month are leading us to a slightly longer dev cycle than we're strictly comfortable with.

I'm not much for beating the hype drum, but one of our crossovers will come out of left field for a lot of you, and we couldn't be happier with the synergy we think this will bring to both stories.

As always, Kent and I are grateful for your continued support and patience as we do our thing.   We can't wait to show you where the story goes next!

Stone Fox Livestream: January 21 @ 1600 UTC

**UPDATE**   We had to move back to Discord due to multi-host limitations with Twitch.   Updated link below:

Now that the holidays are behind us, along with the Chapter 6 release, Kentyrr and Stoya will host our bi-update LiveSteam this Saturday.   

As he has in the past, our friend Xor from Thunderline Studios will emcee while we discuss Chapter 6, our vision, and the road ahead.

Kent will do a brief demonstration on how he turns raw script into digital reality, with a focus on capturing expressions.

As always, we'll keep the stream running as long in Q&A as long as good questions are coming in!

Given the potentially larger audience, and the fact that stream will be open to Steam and Itch customers, we're moving the venue from Discord to Twitch.

Fan interaction is our favorite part of development, and we hope to see everyone there!  For those of us in the Western hemisphere, we apologize for the early timeslot, but this splits the difference between Europe and Oceania.

Venue Link: https://discord.com/channels/726280634674315356/726287390964056105

Chasing Sunsets Chapter 7 Dev Update #3

With the holidays behind us, Kent and I are leaning into the meat of this chapter.   For Kent, it's a lot of artwork, and for me it's something a lot less exciting but long overdue.

For starters, Discord Integration has been removed after the poll to do so was so decisive.   Secondly, I've migrated the existing content to Ren'Py 8.0.3.   This required fairly significant regression testing as a number of features and code elements were broken by decremented modules being sunsetted.

Further, I've scrubbed all game files to remove any leftover or unused stuff that may have gotten swept up with the compile.

I will post updated links soon to v07b that introduces the framework changes to Chapter 6 that Chapter 7 and beyond will be built upon.   This won't add new content, and many of the changes will be transparent to the player.   

*NOTE*  It will not be necessary to upgrade to this incremented version before downloading Chapter 7 when it is ready, so don't worry if you want to spare your bandwidth!

I've also begun adding some dynamic panning and zoom to content already available.   The idea here was to make the game feel more immersive with some simulated parallax.   It's not something we want to overuse, but in places where the emphasis makes sense, or where it adds to a scene, it should add to the overall production value.

I have also updated the original interface fonts with open-source replacements that are much better tailored toward localization and multilingual display.   These do not look jarringly different from what was in place before, but it's a big milestone on the road toward being able to use generic TL files for alternate languages.

All that boring housekeeping aside, there have been no surprises so far that look likely to impose delay.

As previously stated, what would have been Chapter 7 will now be split into Chapters 7 and Chapter 8, increasing the total number of instalments from 10 to 11 to complete the story.  At the end of the day, it felt like taking twice as long to deliver a super-sized chapter or cutting corners on the story were the greater evils than a little scope creep.

So, what do you have to look forward to in Chapter 7?   Without spoiling anything, I can say this:

• Mallory and Amanda probably have a theory to share with the greater team.
• MC and Jaye had a good (maybe amazing!) day off, and will have to regroup on what that means.
• Vince is probably none too happy about how Chapter 6 ended.
• Depending on MC behavior, it's becoming unlikely certain cats can remain in bags much longer.
• Sophie may have found the key to Pandora's Box.  Will it get opened?
• Side girls of the world unite!  

I can't say much more without spoiling story beats, but with the pressure off to make so much happen in a single chapter, I feel a lot better about what Chapter 7 and 8 combined will offer.  

As always, Kent and I are grateful for your trust and patronage, and we are looking forward to watching our story arrive at its destination over the next few chapters!

Merry Christmas from Stone Fox Studios

It's that busy time of year, and between vacations and holiday celebrations, Kentyrr and I continue to plug away at Chapter 7, having achieved a heavy milestone with a scene we could barely fit in our GPU VRAM.

Unfortunately, we did find a model error on one character after rendering a depressing number of images of her that will have to be re-rendered, but this is a fairly minor speedbump, as frustrating as it is.

That's (almost) all behind us now, and we can begin focusing on the rest of the chapter.   My water blocks finally arrived, so I'm rendering on dual RTX 4090's...In other words, art is getting processed as fast as Kent can compose it!   He was also fortunate enough to snag one for his rig as well, so he'll be benefitting for the additional horsepower himself soon.

In the meantime, I've certified up to Chapter 6 on the new build of Ren'Py.

SteamDeck had some issues with the older version of Ren'Py that have been remedied in 8.0.3, so there will be an updated version of 0.7a pushed to all platforms within a week or so.   This adds no new content, it's simply version housekeeping.   If you had no issues with Chapter 6, Chapter 7 will ship with it anyway.

I apologize for the relative quiet on this page recently, as I spent a few weeks on vacation, and then returned to being behind schedule with holiday shopping and the like.   That said, I can look forward to a week or so off to get caught up now, and it should all balance out.

In development news, Lisa has been updated to Genesis 8.1, and the script is undergoing logic testing.   About 400 images have been rendered to date, with another 1000 to go.   

We're also excited to be working out the details on a crossover we hope many of you will appreciate!

Music selection is underway, with several new tracks already earmarked.

After this weekend's holiday, we expect the remainder of the development cycle to settle into it's more predictable rhythm...Keep checking the Discord for sneak peeks and preview images!

All of that aside, Stone Fox Studios (and the cast of Chasing Sunsets) want to wish each and every one of you a holiday season filled with warmth, love, and...Maybe just a little wetness!

~Stoya and Kentyrr

Chasing Sunsets Chapter 7 Progress Update

This is just a short update to let everyone know things are proceeding apace for Chapter 7.

Kent is all settled into his new digs and kicking out fresh Chapter 7 art, and that should keep him busy while I'm making up to my wife for the last two years of development in the Caribbean.

As usual, while I'm out and about, I'll be able to render remotely so Kent's PC is free for art and posing.

Shortly after I return, we'll host our semi-chapter livestream, so be sure to queue up your questions and comments for that.

In the meantime, enjoy an image of our updated Lisa with her new PBR skin!

Not much to report other than things are moving smoothly so far, and we hope to see rendering ramp up even more when I return, as the water blocks for my 4090's should be close to arriving.  We anticipate gaining about 100% more CUDA power out of those in early December!

As we glide into the holidays, Kent and I are particularly thankful to our supporters, especially as economies slow down.   We look forward to doing our best to justify your faith in us in Chapter 7 and beyond!

~Stone Fox Studios    

Chasing Sunsets v1.10 (Complete) Download Links

Here are the links to the final content release of Chasing Sunsets.

This episode builds off the future unlocked by your choices in the main game with consequences in both the short and longer term. Our largest update to the game by a significant margin, this episode acts as closure for the origin story and sets up the shot for what's coming next.

The most recent update is v1.10 which completes the Chasing Sunsets story, and ties up most of the loose ends, but leaving just enough to connect it to the next installment in the Polygene universe.

v1.10 also stomps some bugs that led some players to be unable to maximize points with some love interests in certain scenarios. Some of these are fixed trans parently, and the most egregious of which will require a new playthrough beginning at Ch9. That save should be present on page 99 of your saves in the 10th slot.

Thank you for your patience, everyone. Please find the Mega and GoFile download links for Chasing Sunsets Chapter 10 (Complete Game) below. Releases populate to all platforms on the same day.

Mega: Mac / PC

GoFile:  Mac / PC

Chasing Sunsets - Of Livestreams, Patches, and Polls

As the holidays approach, and Chapter 6 is firmly in our rearview mirror, I thought I'd take a moment to make a few announcements.

New Binary/Patch Download Approach

The first is that we'll be changing our download links to folders, so you can choose the Mac or PC version at your discretion.   We'll also keep the latest patch file in there in case you don't want to do a full download again.

The folder link WILL update whenever there's a new chapter released, but this should minimize the confusion over where to download files and what the latest version is with the current chapter going forward.

These links should now be live and can be found stickied at the top of the patron page.

Chasing Sunsets 0.7a (Bugfix) Released

This leads me to my second announcement:   In those folders you will find Chasing Sunsets v0.7a.   You can either download the full binary at the new links, or download the 0.7a "scripts.rpa" file in the subfolder.   This can be copied to "ChasingSunsets/game/" and with an overwrite, should update your current install to 0.7a with no difficulty.

This is not a critical update, as none of the bugs were really game-breaking, but this does resolve a number of spelling/grammatical issues, and also tones down the Chapter Summary statements if you chose certain paths after becoming more serious with Mallory.   The full patch notes will be available in the folder with the patch itself.

Chasing Sunsets is Gaining Weight

The third announcement may be a bit more controversial:   After flowcharting what needs to happen in Chapter 7, I do not believe we can comfortably fit it all in one chapter.   After speaking with Kentyrr, I believe the best option will be to increase the planned chapter count to complete the game to Prologue + 10 chapters.

I know this may be frustrating for people who saw the story coming to a quicker conclusion, but we feel we would not be able to do the story justice if we tried to cram everything that needs to happen next into a single update.   Alternatively, we could have just made a super-sized chapter, but we feel that regular content updates keep our story relevant.   We're sorry if anyone feels let down by this scope creep.

Post-Release Developer Livestream in December

Next, I'd like to announce that we'll likely host our post-release Livestream on Dec 10th.   As we get closer to stream date, we'll finalize the date and time, with no small deference to our host's availability.   Please don't hesitate to begin posting questions for the Livestream in the #questions-for-dev-streams channel in Discord.

All are welcome, and Kentyrr and I love every chance we get to interact with fans of the story.   We hope to see you there!

Chapter 7 Announced!

Lastly, I would like to announce the kick-off of Dev Cycle 8, as we begin working on Chapter 7, titled "Convergence."

It's time for the Campbells to start wrapping things up on Tonalu and begin to looking at returning home.   As the chapter title implies, a lot of moving parts are starting to build toward a climax, and some of them will determine the shape of things to come.

Accelerated endings will become more common in the remaining chapters as the story moves into the third act.   The echoes of choices made far in the past may return to help - or haunt - our protagonists.

While this has already been a long update, I wanted to wrap up with a poll. 

A Quick Poll

Discord integration was one of those things we implemented that seemed better on paper than it ended up being in practice.   One of the things we did not consider as carefully as we should have is that adult gaming isn't something many people want to advertise to their other friends on Discord.   

While we made the feature toggleable in the settings menu, I am considering ripping it out entirely, unless the player base finds it useful.

For those who don't dig into the settings much, all Discord integration does is show under the player's name in Discord that they are playing Chasing Sunsets, and approximately what part of the game they are on.

Chasing Sunsets Chapter 6 is Gold!

The wait is over, and just in time for Halloween!

Chapter 6 is released for all patrons and supporters on all platforms just in time for Halloween!

I'd write more, but I'm running on 45 minutes of sleep over the past 36 hours.

We sincerely hope you enjoy playing as much as we did making "Downtime."

I will post WeTransfer links after they're populated for those who have Mega challenges.   I am also in the process of publishing to Steam, though I still have a few achievements to test before I can move it out of the beta branch.

As always, please respect spoiler discipline in Discord until several days have passed and the bulk of the supporter community has played.

Report any bugs in the #bug-reports channel.

Apologies for the links being reversed in the email for PC/Mac.   That should be corrected now.

Mega Link 

WeTransfer Link

With enduring gratitude,

Stoya/Kentyrr

Stone Fox Studios

Chasing Sunsets Chapter 6 Release Imminent!

This is just a short update to let everyone know that Chapter 6 is in beta, and that we are tracking for release within the next week.

Beta has identified a few minor issues that we are working to adjust, and at the last minute we decided to add an additional scene for balance, which is rendering as I write this.   That said, nothing has materialized out of beta that looks to endanger our intended release in the next few days!   

So, what can you expect in this update?

• 1600 of Kentyrr's expressive renders!
• Lots of Stoya's big dumb words!
• More animations! (Including much-improved Lisa animations from Ch5)
• All of the flashbacks!
• 15 new achievements!
• New original music with multiple tracks commissioned for this game alone!
• Road rash and Monkeypox!   (No panik pls!)
• Some of our best lewd content to date (at least beta team thinks so!)
• Our protagonists figure some stuff out!
• Creampies!  (Yes, PLURAL!   Sancho asked, we listened.)
• Today's forecast:   Chance of butt stuff!

My next post will be to provide download links BEFORE the end of the month, for those of you who are watching your subscription renewal.

Watch your inboxes and Discord for the official launch announcement, and as always, we appreciate all of the patience and support you give us while we do our thing!

Chasing Sunsets: Upcoming Ch6 Release

We're in crunch time now!

While I was hoping to release at the end of September, we are still plugging away at the art, with roughly 200 images to pose/render and 3 animations still cooking in the background.

That may sound like a lot, but it's not.   It does mean that while we won't be out quite as early as we hoped, we've still got a couple of weeks of development time ahead of us.  I'm frustrated that I will lose 5 days in New York (which is what I was trying to avoid,) but I will try to make up for lost time on the road.

Since we are slipping past the end of September, if your financial situation won't allow you to continue supporting us in October, reach out to us after release and we'll try to make it right.

The longer dev cycle also means this will be our largest chapter content-wise to date, clocking in at around 1600+ total renders with additional script to match.  The animations so far are looking by far the best as the DAZ to Blender import process becomes better understood.

I should also point out that the Lisa animations from Chapter 5 have been remastered and are vastly improved.

We are experimenting with micro-consequences more and more, and you can expect to see that starting to materialize in Chapter 6.   What this means is that how a scene plays out may have more content, more varied content, or unfold in a different order depending on prior decisions while not necessarily having a big effect on your ending.

Expect another 14 or so achievements, and spicy content on all paths.

We're feeling the pressure (but mostly the excitement) build as we move into the final stretch in what we hope is the chapter many of you have been waiting for!

My next announcement should be to announce availability when we're ready in October.   Thanks once again for sticking with us.   We couldn't do this without all of you!

Chasing Sunsets Chapter 6: Beta Build in Progress

At Stone Fox Studios, we like our autumns hot.

It's been a while since I've made an update, and for that I deeply apologize.  I've had a number of real life issues creep up that have impacted my level of engagement.  One advantage of a partnership is that this also means it has NOT affected the development timeline.   

Over the next four days, I will be compiling a beta build for Chapter 6.   While art is not entirely complete yet -- There are some animations and still art pending -- this follows our usual pattern of creating the playable chapter while we wait for the last of the art to backfill.

That said, art has taken a bit longer than expected due to a number of scene compositions that had to be heavily kitbashed from existing assets and some render times that ran longer than we would have liked due to lighting, but nothing too egregious.

Next week, we should have a pretty good idea of how the chapter has come together and what, if anything, we need to augment, refine, or leave on the cutting room floor.

Next week I will be focusing on:

• Achievement integration
• Sound and music refinement and tweaking
• Dialogue refinement
• Branch integrity testing
• Fit and finish miscellaneous items 

As always, we deeply appreciate your patience as we ply our craft, and hope you find the finished product worth the wait.   Be sure to DM me if you would prefer not to be included in the credits crawl at the end of the chapter.   We do our best to make sure that subscriber names are not easily linked to you:   For example "Alex Campbell" would be listed in the credits as "Alex C."

I'll provide another update as we close in on our release date.

Chasing Sunsets Ch6 Dev Update: Pulling It All Together

Tonight marks a milestone of development I refer to as "Asset Collapse."   Basically, the goal at this point is to combine the art, sound, dialogue, and choice matrix into a playable skeleton and flesh out what remains "until it's ready."

This is the phase where I build achievements, scene and photo gallery additions, and make any UI changes that make sense.

This phase is also about refining art and dialogue we may have already completed, and represents the milestone of the chapter where Kent and I see all the pieces coming together for the first time.

If you are not in our Discord, we hope you'll reconsider!   We have a great community of fans and Kentyrr and I are pretty active and love to hear feedback, theories, and speculation.

At the risk of jinxing us, our goal is to release before the end of September since I will be at a wedding in New York for the first week of October, and I would hate to see development slip past that.  As always, the caveat is "when it's ready."   I'd hate to release the night before I fly out and run into a game-breaking bug while 3000 miles from my development PC!

In any case, no news for us usually means good news - We haven't run into any major roadblocks or identified any risks that make us feel like we need to raise the red flag.

That doesn't mean we haven't had a close call or two:  One of my NVMe SSDs shat the bed on Sunday, and I lost a day to system recovery, but fortunately saw no impact to game files (which are backed up in triplicate anyway!)

Starting to feel that "release on the horizon" rush, and can't wait to show you all what we've been up to!

In the meantime, we've been curious about the dominant playthrough for some time.   We'd love to hear how you are tackling the story.

Chasing Sunsets Dev Update #3 - Steady As She Goes!

Normally I'd say we hit the mid point of the development cycle and it's downhill from here, but it feels like we hit that milestone a week or so back, knock on wood.

Thankfully, render times have come down in recent scenes and we've made up for some of the pain we experienced earlier in the chapter.   For a visual indicator of where we are from an art perspective, the blurred page below shows the chapter flowchart, and the dark areas are complete -- So a significant part of it!

So far, there have been no roadblocks or other surprises that would point toward any delays, and we'll begin focusing on animation and integration on the back end of the development cycle.

Speaking of cycles, as you can see from the preview image, we finally got a chance to realize another scene we've been bouncing around in our heads since the Prologue!   Kent's at his best when he's challenged to deliver cinematic sequences, and we're hoping that really shines through here.

So, what can you look forward to?

• More insight on what's got Prizer so worked up
• A peek into an event that set the siblings onto a collision course when they were teens. 
• A potential wrecking ball ahead that may take a beautiful mind to see coming
• The most impactful decisions for the endgame to date
• A chance to begin thawing at least one icy acquaintance

As we move into the remainder of the development cycle, I'll start locking down beta and release targets in subsequent updates.

We will likely host a Livestream after the release of Chapter 6, so begin queuing up questions in the #questions-for-dev-streams channel on our Discord!

On a personal note, when we began this project, we always thought it would be cool if we just generated enough interest to cover the expense of producing it.   

During development, my beagle is often curled up under my desk keeping me company.   She got sick recently, and thanks to the support we've gotten, I found myself with enough socked away to have her treated.   Some things go beyond gratitude, and this is one of them!    

Chasing Sunsets Demo!

Since we are past the halfway point of our game, we are releasing the game through Chapter 3 as a public demo.  Enjoy the first three chapters on us, and see what we've been up to!

PC Version

Mac Version

Chasing Sunsets: Chapter 6, Dev Update #2 (And poll!)

Things are moving along again after a bit of a workflow disruption.  Kentyrr typically does the scene building and posing on his rig, and in turn, I render them since writing and coding doesn't require a ton of GPU, and leaves him free to do his bit.

Early last week, I began migrating my development rig into a bigger case with better cooling.  The process has taken a bit longer than expected, so there is a bit of a backlog on artwork rendering.  Renders in the first few scenes are taking unusually long as well.

This all sounds bad, but it's not.  My last touches on the rebuilt rig were completed yesterday, and I'm rendering around the clock.  Over the next few weeks, the backlog will be absorbed and I'll be waiting on new art again.

While this doesn't impact the development cycle timeline, it has sidetracked me on a few things I've been wanting to make progress on, including language localization (so we can support multiple languages) and codebase collapse.  After giving Kent enough dialogue to keep him occupied for a few weeks, that will be my focus.

We're beginning on the fourth scene now, and hopefully we'll begin to see render times come down.

For those of you who are interested, I thought I'd give you a little insight into what your patronage has done:

When we began Chasing Sunsets, Kent was running a single watercooled GeForce 1080ti GPU, and I was running a single aircooled 2080ti GPU on a Ryzen 3600X.

Since then, we have put about 75% of our Patreon pledges back into the project in some way, shape, or form:

We have:

• Both upgraded our development rigs to state-of-the-art
• Formed a business partnership (and some friends for life)
• Met (virtually) some of our AVN heroes (Drifty, STWADev, CNG, Naughty Captain, Xor, and many more)
• Filed a copyright 
• Purchased countless instances of art and music
• Contracted out for 3D object assets and animation
• Launched on Steam

Much of this would not have been possible without you.  Kent is nearly at the point where he can begin looking at doing this full time, and if the trend continues, I may be able to as well for a second game.  It's beyond anything we ever dreamed that this might transition from a hobby to our livelihood!

"Do what you love and you'll never work another day of your life."

With that said, as the conclusion of Jaye and MC's story begins to slip into view, I thought we'd take a moment and poll you all for what kind of game we should do next.

I will follow up with a poll on the setting and theme for our next game in our next update.    

*Note - This simply informs our decision making process, and will not necessarily determine what we choose to do next.

Chasing Sunsets Official Walkthrough Available

This is just a quick note for those who are interested that an official walkthrough is now available for Chasing Sunsets thanks to the untiring efforts of Dorn and Xerus.

You can grab it here.

I'll post the walkthrough link with the official download links in the stickied post as well.

Chasing Sunsets: Chapter 6 / Dev Cycle 7 In Full Swing!

I thought I'd take a moment to update everyone on how Chapter 6 is coming along.   

If you're following along in our Discord, by now you know Kent and I are particularly happy to be working on this update as it will contain some content we've been looking forward to since before we began development.

As such, we've hit the ground running, and the new chapter is fully flowcharted, and the logic/decision tree for the entire update is already coded in!

Dialogue is following a bit more slowly, and as always, art is the long pole in the tent.   In any case, Kent hasn't been a slouch there either:   Scene 1 is fully posed and rendered, and tonight he began on Scene 2.

Chapter 6 will be titled "Downtime," and will focus on relationships and their trajectories, with the main story riding shotgun.

This seems like a good time to share our vision of the remaining four chapters.

The girls are going to become increasingly interested in where they factor into the player's plans, and how the MC reconciles what he says his intentions are against how he actually behaves.

In a practical sense, this means the main character can be pursuing a pure path with either (or neither) of the two main love interests, a platonic path with both, or try his luck and thread the needle between any combination of them.  This also means that our updates will necessarily begin to feature more lewd content to accommodate those paths.

As always, our intent is to make any lewd content (which takes place in the "present" tense of the story) optional, though turning down a girl you've telegraphed intentions with may have relationship consequences.

The remainder of the game will be split between Tonalu and Boston as the central story builds toward a resolution.  

In the meantime, we are looking at coding in support for additional languages.

We do intend to host another livestream after the release of Chapter 6, so start adding your questions to #questions-for-dev-streams as you think of them, and we'll do our best to answer them live.

We thank you all for the overwhelming support you have shown our little project and hope you see that gratitude reflected in what we deliver for you next.   We are on a mission!

Chasing Sunsets Chapter 5: v0.6b

This is a fairly minor update and adds no new content, but does address a number of typos, bugs, and some continuity issues.

This also removes the rest of the media player code for players who were experiencing issues with that, as well as removes the Teamviewer executable that somehow got stuck in one of the image folders by mistake.

Saves should be mostly unaffected, other than Mallory's path adds one additional maximum trust point.  This point is awarded at the end of Ch5 during the lewd scene, so players who were chasing Mallory points can load their save, roll back, and replay the choice as they see fit.  

Here is the changelog.

Critical:

• Corrected game continuing to Chapter 5 after game over scenario in Ch4.
• Corrected repeated dialogue and double award of points on one path in the Ch5 club scene.
• Corrected incorrect point assignment during lewd scene at end of Ch5.  Mallory max trust increased by 1.
• Corrected issue where sound effects and music continue to loop after the overboard scene in Ch4.
• A Teamviewer executable was left in one of the image directories by mistake, and has been removed.

Major:

• Corrected typo on MC writing sayer which would result in an an error.
• Removed obsolete beta test warning placard in Ch4 (It said:  Save here, no art past this point)
• Line in text conversation with Sophie in Ch5 incorrectly attributed to MC corrected.
• Fixed an issue with the Jaye text conversation where dialogue could be repeated.
• Fixed a continuity issue in Jaye text conversation that did not properly take into account if MC chose not to shower with her.
• Removed last of media player code

Minor:

• Fixed continuity issue during shots scene that did not take into account MC may not have showered with Jaye in Ch4.
• All identified typos, and double or missing words corrected.

The binaries are available on Mega now, and for those who require a Mega alternative, will be available from our server later today.   Additionally, these fixes have simultaneously pushed to Steam.

PC Version (Mega) 

Mac Version (Mega) 

Chasing Sunsets Ch5 - Available Now to All Tiers

Stone Fox Studios is pleased to announce that Chasing Sunsets Chapter 5 is now available for download to patrons of all tiers.

We hope you have as much fun playing it as we did making it.

Chapter 5 is the windup before the throw into the concluding half of the story and squarely at the intersection where several story arcs we've been following from the beginning converge:   Thus, the chapter title; Crossroads.

In any case, this ended up weighing in by a small margin as our largest chapter to date, with nearly 1500 renders, six new animations, 14 achievements, three (and a half) lewd scenes, and more of our patented cinematic brand of storytelling,  action-packed with innuendo, pop culture references, meme fodder, smoking-hot ladies, self-aware jokes and ginger throat punches.

Also keep an eye out for our largest crossover cameo yet, courtesy of our friends at Thunderline Studios.

As always, stick around for the post-credits scene!

The Steam executable should be uploaded for players on that platform within the next 24 hours.

A few notes:

• All known bugs from previous releases have been addressed
• The soundtrack that appeared in Ch4 has been removed due to ToS concerns
• Some points in Ch5 are only available if certain choices were made in previous chapters

For those of you experiencing "Unlock" exceptions periodically (Crashes or Grey Screens) for NoneType issues, I have added a "Persistence Clear" button in Settings > Help.

**Note**  This will delete your Achievements, Scene, and Image gallery unlocks, but will not void your saved games.   

For the few people who are experiencing this issue, it may be a preferable option to dealing with game unpredictability or immersion-breaking errors.   Do not use this unless you are specifically seeing "NoneType" exceptions or want to re-run unlocks for some reason.  It may also clear up problems accumulated while running a modded game in the past.

Without further ado, please find the links below.

PC Version (Mega)  

Mac Version 

Chasing Sunsets Ch5 - In Beta Testing / Release This Week

Our first round of beta testing is complete, and final rendering and sound design is in progress now.

If all goes well, I will post a release candidate tonight, and we'll launch in the next day or so!

Thanks again to all of you for your patience as we adjusted to some industry changes that require us to rethink how we add licensed content.

Our intent is to launch as a "Pre-release" to all patrons, and after a week, it will become the Release version with any bugfixes applied.   I'll make sure to include release notes if there are any differences.

Chapter 5 is nearly identical to Chapter 4 in size, with over 1400 renders, a return of animations, and what we hope is our trademark brand of humor, storytelling, and lewdness where it makes sense.

An announcement will be made in Discord as soon as the links go hot!

Chasing Sunsets Ch5 - "Soon"

After some hair loss, occasional dog punting, and several 750ml bottles of Woodford Reserve, I believe we have our music issues resolved and are preparing to move forward with our beta.

There is some supplemental art still being rendered and one animation remains in progress, but we should be able to enter beta by next weekend, and look forward to release the week after that, barring any shockingly dumb continuity errors spotted by the beta team that requires significant new art.

I will be out for four days in sunny Arizona starting tomorrow for a small vacation, but plan to make up for it on the tail end when I return to my development rig on Tuesday.

While I'm out of town, I can continue to work on coding and features to some degree, so it's not really lost time.

In any case, Kent and I are very happy with how things have come together and our latest instalment is looking good to us!  

We can't wait to share the latest with all of you soon!

Chasing Sunsets Ch5 - The Artlist Dilemma

"If you ever want to make God laugh, just tell Him your plans"  --Ancient Proverb

To our surprise and shock, a fellow developer got a DMCA notice from Artlist this week.  Artlist changed their Terms of Service at some point, and they are now enforcing a new obscenity clause.   

Takedown notices are designed to protect the IP of an artist from being used without or in violation of a license, and many artists are understandably skittish about their work being associated with adult content.

Unfortunately, it also creates a lawfare extortion racket that we want to steer clear of.

Luckily, we only began using Artlist with Chapter 4, but it appears as if before we release Chapter 5, we will have to remove any music we obtained from Artlist for Chapter 4 and 5 and find replacements.

Just to clarify, Stone Fox is not in trouble, but rather than tempt fate, we will adjust proactively.   

When served with a takedown notice, all platforms (Patreon, Subscribestar, Itch, and Steam) will unlist your game and de-monetize it until the terms of the takedown are met and the new product can be reviewed.

Needless to say, this is a gut punch, and will lead to an estimated two week delay before the Chapter 5 release.   Not only that, there are a few songs I doubt I will be able to replace with anything comparable via other resources.   This is not the news we were hoping to post this weekend.

While I work on that, we'll use the extra time to add some extra animation and content to Chapter 5 to compensate you for your patience.

The animation completed so far absolutely raises the bar and we hope you'll agree.

I will keep you posted as this unfolds.   

Chasing Sunsets Ch5 - Final Dev Update before Beta

We have finished principal art for Chapter 5, and animations are under way.   The next post we make here should be the commencement of the beta test and solidifying our expected delivery date.

As always, keep in mind that as integration and finalization progresses, minor new art may be necessary to supplement scenes we feel underrepresented or just off.  We'll also take beta feedback into account and make adjustments if our QC team identifies anything that misfires.

Chapter 5 serves as a bridge between the setup half of the story, and when the dominoes begin to fall.   We look forward to peeling back more layers of the onion with all of you and showing you how the events of Chapter 4 echo into the following days.

Expect more reveals on the underlying story, meaningful progress with the ladies, a crossover, and as always more achievements, sexy situations, humor, and pop culture jokes.

While the end is in sight, the next few weeks are always the most hectic, so we thank you again for supporting us and we hope we continue to earn your fandom with our next instalment!   

When beta is looking solid and we've finalized our post-credits scene, I'll make an announcement with the render/animation count and more metrics on the chapter.

What did Lisa have to say to MC?   How effective was Amanda's treatment?  Is Jaye freaking out about that second shower?   What does George look like in drag?    How has Mallory handled the reveal about her identity?  Who is that dour chad in the promo picture above?

At least some of this will be answered in "Chapter 5:  Crossroads," coming soon to a Mega link near you!

Happy Easter from the pervs at Stone Fox!

Dev Update #4 - Sunset in Sight!

Cheers!

I think this is the longest I've gone without a dev update, and for that I offer my sincerest apologies.    Kent has been heads-down on the art, and I've been working on integration.  As of this moment we're at about 1100 renders complete, and are most of the way through the final story scene of the chapter.  To our chagrin, the render times on this last scene have been really long.  I'd got to bed with 25 images queued up and find only four had completed overnight.   That said, that room is behind us, and the new art is going significantly faster.

So what's left on the to-do list?  We have the lewd scenes left to do.  Our next step is to content-gather the assets for these scenes and or queue up the animation process.  While animation is sourcing, I'll continue to work on integration and path testing, before handing off to beta testers.  

Over the next week, Kent and I will be able to start to see the chapter come to life as we do our first playthrough with art integrated, and we're excited to see how it looks in context.  Right now, we are shooting for an end of April release.

We again thank all of our friends and patrons for your patience and support as we continue peeling back the layers on the MC's story!