[~July Development Report~]

Before we begin, I'd like to address the silence from us on Substar and many other socials we run since May.

It's no surprise that we've had issues with development for a long while and with that, I've tried to generally keep everyone informed, but it's been a double edge blade for myself and of course our fans/supporters who are eagerly awaiting new content.

When I do offer more information as to what's going on behind the scenes and try to give people answers that they're looking for, without it blowing up in my face as yet another delay or [insert reason] for why there's a new goal on dates/time expected for new content. On the flip side to that, recently I've tried a different approach, which has been a lack of information until we can showcase what we have in store for everyone without a doubt.

The issue is that everyone following us is different and has their own ideals for what we should be doing in regards to this. There's people who are totally fine with no confirmation on a given date or time for when expected content is coming, but there's also people who are naturally curious. So, it puts us between a rock and a hard place on how we proceed to approach saying much about it.

Overall, I don't blame anyone personally, but this is why I've tried a different approach here during June and much of July, but regardless of which approach we go with. There will always be people who think we should be handling things differently and we know deep down, no matter how hard we try... We can't please everyone, it's impossible.

That said, it's time to break the silence and explain what our plans are for the upcoming months and heading forward for the project as a whole.

[~Content moving forward~]

One major goal for this summer has been to get a lot done behind the scenes for new content. Mainly this is to provide our team with a nest egg worth of content that is pretty much ready to go out the door and be released. We've been stacking up content during June and July with the plan of slowly rolling out this finished content at a steady rate each month moving forward.

We're trying to first make sure we're in a solid spot with this content that's ready, before we open the flood gates once again. Our issue in the past with development even as recent as December 2023 into January 2024, is that we did deliver new content during these times, but we didn't quite have the rest of the content that follows suit ready yet.

So, once we deliver that amount of content at the time, behind the scenes... We're in a more stressed out state of mind in order to get anything else done in time before the expectations kick in for the next amount of content to be delivered on a never-ending cycle from month to month.

Hence our plan during this summer, with ensuring we have enough content ready behind the scenes and find a steady pace of what we can deliver safely each month and also actively develop even more new content to add to this pool of content that's ready to be released as we begin the flood of releasing content again.

Which brings me to our next point...

During our development for a long time now, in the early days. We were able to push out bigger updates every month without fail typically speaking, but we've realized that shortly after finishing episode 4, that this was becoming much, much harder for us to do anymore.

Despite this, I still wanted to hold out hope and deliver episode 5 as our biggest update for the project. It's the conclusion of the common route and wraps up the general setup for Messy Academy's world setting, characters and the like, before it heads into route content. The idea is that route content is much easier to split up and deliver content that's not as big as the previous episodes 1-5 are expected.

In my mindset, it felt as if we just get past this big hurdle to conclude the common route. We'd be smooth sailing from then on for the project, which has clearly been much, much harder than I had expected. Part of this is due to a lot going on personally with family and mental stress bearing down on me, along with this unrealistic goal of delivering a huge update that has only been delayed and further delayed as we've tried to tackle it on top of other personal issues in my day to day life.

We're always grateful for everyone who has been more than patient with us and supporting this project and our team throughout the years and deep down, our intention has never been to purposely take advantage of anyone. I've tried to be very open about how we spend monthly funding into the project in the past and still, there's people who honestly believe that the average totals of $900-1100usd isn't being fueled into the game project purely and that somehow even a fraction of that amount is covering my personal bills or needs.

Which is silly to think for those who are very aware of the cost of living and the only reason I'm able to get by without a ton of worry, without the need for any of the project's funding for personal affairs... Is because I thankfully live with my Brother and his girlfriend, with an agreement that while I'm working on college classes and have a bit more time in the day. I would also tackle any house chores, cooking, cleaning and be the one to take our dogs for walk or let them enjoy the dog park once a week.

But there's been cases over time where people honestly believe that I'm living off of our monthly funding, but anyone familiar with the art field knows just how expensive art can cost. Easily, 50% of our monthly funding goes directly to cg art and sometimes that provides us with 3 new cg scenes paid for, sometimes it's 2 or 1 new cg scene. It all depends on many factors just like when you commission an artist and they ask if you want a simple or advanced background, one or two characters, etc. The price goes up with each addition.

But now I'm rambling in the different direction... Back to episode 5 content and our future development plans...

Moving forward, starting with July into August. We are stepping down from these huge expectations of delivering massive content all at once, like our original plan was for episode 5. It just isn't working clearly and we have to be honest with ourselves and our fans/supporters.

From this point forward with the project development, we are going back to delivering new content every month. The amount of content and expectation in size is being cut down to realistic ideals that we can deliver on, bite-sized new content each month.

What exactly does bite-sized content look like in comparison to a full episode?

Well, first we'll be delivering the remainder of episode 5 broken up by their scenes that make up the entire episode. Our upcoming release in the works that should hit very soon, is going to consist of 2-3 scenes added to episode 5. (When I say scenes, I mean writing wise.) These scenes consist of word counts that range from 2000 words for Rachel/Juliet's scene, 1500 words for Heather's scene and 1000 words for a mini transition scene featuring Lola/Zoey and Karissa.

The following scenes beyond that do shoot up a bit on word count, so our next update after that should feature Nova's scene at 2500 word count and Erika's scene at 2000 word count. Then our following update after that would wrap episode 5 up with Miki's scene at 2500 word count and the ending scene for ep 5 at 1000 word count.

These will be 3 bite-sized game updates being released. The first one should be out very soon, then the second update (Nova/Erika scenes) should be out shortly after sometime in the first half of August, as the later half of August provides everyone with the third update (Miki/ending scenes)

Once episode 5's content has been delivered in this way, we'll continue into September with this bite-sized content delivery, except it'll be a mix of QoL additions/fixes being made to earlier episode content. (Female protag addition, oc's fitted into mini scenes between existing scenes, etc.) Along with route episodes as our continuation of new content pushing the story further.

Route episode content is typically between 7,000-12,000 word count, in comparison to episode 5's grand total of 25,000-30,000 word count. Even if we realize we can't get a entire route episode fully finished and ready within a given month, but we have 2 out of 3 scenes done. We'll simply release the 2 finished scenes and in-game, it'll display a special scene that'll read: "This is not the end of this route episode! New content is still being developed and will be added in our next update."

Ideally, we don't want to that to be a common thing. But my mindset in recent times has been that it's better we deliver something on a steady basis, vs nothing. People can choose for themselves, if they support us from month to month for what they receive, or if they take breaks between and check back in on the game every 2-3 months, whatever fits each person's tastes.

But overall, it's very clear to myself and the team that we need to change our approach with development and expectations of what we're doing for content each month to deliver upon. We just realistically can't hype up big updates per month like we once did long ago and there are other games in active development that put out small releases and people seem okay with that support wise or otherwise.

Regardless, all funding efforts towards Messy Academy along the way is going straight into development. As we inch closer to all sprite art or gui work being fully finished, more funds will sink into cg art as that's our massive costs area for the project all the way up to the very end while we're polishing the finalized product and adding new cg art in if we outpace our artists.

Thank you all for the continued patience and support! For many who we've offended along the way, we're truly sorry you feel indifferent and we can only hope that our more realistic development plans outlined above can win you back even as fans or supporters in the future.

[~Team updates~]

Briefly before we begin, I'd like to highlight that we don't have the previews section ready and I had to decide on breaking the silence sooner than later, so I hope everyone understands. We are trying to get the previews for the next 3 bite-sized updates together to show off a lot of quality upgrades that's been made to the game here behind the scenes recently, along with the new content sneak peeks of course.

SFX & Ambient Music

Before summer hit, we had reached our support goal of $1200usd! Which brought a voting poll with it, asking if we sink the extra funds into more cg art or bring aboard a sound professional to create unique SFX and ambient music needed for the game.

I'd like to personally say thank you to everyone I had talked with directly back in May who reached out for the position. I hope regardless of our choice, everyone that didn't get chosen is still doing well and finding work within the field! I always keep tabs on anyone that has skills to offer for game development needs for current or future projects.

Apocalyptic Universe is our chosen person/s to provide Messy Academy with our SFX and ambient music needs in the coming months! They're a two person team and I'd like to share a sample of their sound effects in action, but this will be in our upcoming sneak peek for new content related post.

We started right off the bat with getting a base foundation for diaper related sound effects, knowing that would probably be the highest priority for many enjoying our game. We've now started moving onto the base foundation for some adult action sounds, so those too will be featured in our sneak peek post.

We'll be taking any feedback on these sound effects and applying them for future variations we have planned, as there will be a need for a number of diaper sounds to keep things fresh. (No pun intended :P )

Although our funding has taken a dip, we hope that with the preview of these sound effects and our much more realistic content plan outlined earlier in this post, that it'll help boost funding in the near future to continue covering the costs of SFX needs as that's our first goal while working with Apocalyptic Universe.

CG Art

MarxeDP & AjoseMP have been continuing along in the past two months and we have quite a bit of new cg art to showcase now that we've broken the silence and are ready to continue forward!

Much of the new cg art being done is for route episode content and so we'll be sure to prevent major spoilers with these posts to the best of our ability in terms of context behind them to keep people guessing what on earth led to this given cg scene taking place? :P

They're both hard at work on making sure we have enough cg art for future route content done, but at some point in the far future. Writing for the game will outpace the speed of the cg art and we'll have to put in placeholder scenes in-game until the art is ready. But that probably won't be until we reach route episode 8 content or so.

They've been also slowly tackling old cg scenes that feature the protagonist, updating those to feature the female protagonist "Blythe" and the new visuals for the male protagonist "Brandon". We have all of episode 1's cg art featuring both protagonists updated and ready for our QoL update for episode 1 content in the near future.

We've also been a bit more cautious with how the protagonist appears in cg art to avoid major costs, reserving those moments for when it really makes sense for the protagonist to appear. We've actually started on this with one of Miki's route cg scenes, where we see just the protagonist's arm and hand while making it out to be from their perspective still.

We hope the new cg art will be very exciting as we unveil these in the coming weeks and seen in-game!

Sprite Art

We've been pretty secretive in past months about what Lisa has been working on for the game and for good reason! The time is just around the corner for one of these things, as we'll unveil something truly special and amazing during our 5th year anniversary in the first week of September.

Besides that big surprise and milestone, the other sprite additions recently has been pretty heavy story spoilers and so.. As much as I really want to share official art previews of these, it'd only leave many with more questions than answers as we haven't reached the point in the game's story that aligns with what we'll be seeing visually for some sprites.

When time does come and it is no longer a major spoiler for the masses, we'll then go back and put out official art previews for these without worry.

We do have a very exciting sprite to share sometime early in August when she's finished and while some might be worrying about new characters being introduced on top of the already massive cast. There's many characters that fit a more supportive role and they aren't seen across all routes either, but there are plans for the far future to ensure some of these characters have the means to have DLC content after the base game is complete.

"Rumor spreading around the school recently is that with the upcoming festival around the corner, a famous Sweden pop idol is visiting Pembroke Academy... But not for performing on stage, but to visit a family member."

GUI Art

ds-sans has been a bit busy this summer with work and other tasks, but has kept me well informed with how everything is going and plans on finishing up everything that remains soon enough.

We actually have some previews to share here soon that showcase a new gui screen that'll be accessed through the "Extras" button in-game. A student files screen! Which is a mix between a typical yearbook profile view and mixing in reports about each student or staff at the school. So, once clicked on Miki's yearbook profile box, it'll bring up another screen that displays Miki's sprite more fully and details about her personally, with her background and how she ended up at Pembroke in the first place, etc.

There's not too much more left for GUI needs, as the remaining bits are linked mainly to the "Extras" button and future proofing for DLC content screens and any needs there.

[~Conclusion~]

This wraps up our development report for July! Once again, I wanted to break the silence recently and highlight our realistic plan moving forward for on-going development for the project moving forward. It wasn't a easy decision to make, as I've struggled with myself in past months to take hold of everything going on inside and outside of development... But I believe smaller bite-sized releases for new content is the future of our project and it's better that there's smaller updates on a monthly basis, vs nothing at all as we've seen in the past.

We hope as these smaller updates come on a steady basis, it'll turn things around for the project and how people view Messy Academy in a good light once again. Thank you everyone! <3

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