1 Month!

1 month has passed since the release of the game!

It's been an exciting (and stressful) learning experience. It started with, "Why don't all devs post their nightly bug fixes?" and went to, "Oh, that's why."

And now we're onto full development for Episode 1. I want to share some details in a longer format that I typically don’t get into, just so you understand where things are, where things are going, and how long it might take to get there.

Episode 1 Structure:
Episode 1 is the direct payoff of the Prologue. It starts with Ali and Britney arriving at the beach house for their 3 day weekend trip to Florida.

They arrive late in the night of Day 0 (arrival).

Each day (except day 0) has 3 major time blocks. While this is NOT a simulator, these time blocks roughly act as hubs to allow the player to choose activities within each time slot. Do you want to get coffee in the morning? Take a walk on the beach? Sunbathe? Up to you.

In fact, some activities in some timeslots move time to the next timeslot, and some don't, depending on their narrative scope. For example, going to get coffee in the morning moves time to the afternoon. Taking a shower does not.

I want players to have the choice to engage in smaller scenes like taking a shower, rather than feeling forced to click through them. That said, I do want them to have a purpose. The morning shower, for example, let's you choose Ali's grooming habits. In other cases, you might get to pick out what she wears. (I'm working on the possibility of makeup and nail polish.)

Right now, Day 0/1 is on track to release at the end of the month. It is the most tightly scoped of the 3 days, and will end up roughly 1 third the size of the prologue (about 2,000 lines of code compared to the prologues 6,500), with day 0 being an extra 500 or so.

What I'm doing right now is a lot of writing revision. The first draft of Episode 1 was written before the Prologue was released. And it's surprising even to myself how much has changed since then, especially in the world-building. But also where Ali's character development is at when the episode starts. The goal of these revisions is to bring the writing and grammatical polish to a higher standard than that of the Prologue, as well as realign the episode with Ali's current journey. 

I'm also hard at work incorporating the new overlay system (which required a whole new body-state save system), the new clothing assets, and a new class-based coding system to better organize what event flags are associated with the character's Ali meets.

All that is great, but the BIG thing I'm doing right now is adding a F/F path to the episode. I've had a surprisingly large number of requests and inquiries about a F/F path, or even a F/F ONLY path. So far my answer has been something to the effect of, "if I can do it right, then yes." While I will NOT be going backwards, and adding it to the Prologue, I am going to add it to Episode 1. Day 0/1 will only see hints of it.

I don't know if I can do it right, but I will do my best with it, put the episode out there, and let players decide if it should keep going or not.

Some Really Vague Story Teasers: