Heya! Got a big post for y'all today, so let's get right to it.

Chapter 5 is now available for free on Itch! If you haven't already seen it, we put out a new trailer for the story so far that you can check out on the Itch or Bluesky pages. But, beyond that, Chapter 6 is now available for patrons! This comes alongside some changes to the structure of the Patreon that I wanted to spend some time talking about.

Going forward, patron releases will be one chapter ahead instead of one month ahead. Beta builds will continue to aim for about one week ahead of patron builds.

So, why is this change happening? Well, there isn't really any way to talk about it without addressing the elephant in the room: UNDER | HEAVEN targets a fairly high production value and, consequently, is pretty expensive to make. To date, about 10% of project expenses have been covered by revenue and my estimates of costs for part two put ongoing revenue somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of ongoing costs barring significant delays.

The project's future is not in any danger. If Patreon revenue remains steady or, frankly, drops to zero, this thing will still get made. However, besides somewhat easing the burden on me personally, greater Patreon income will allow me to do things like use less stock assets or push for a higher number of new art assets and a higher level of polish generally. Not to be a downer, but it will also give the project's current levels of polish greater resilience against any future personal financial hardships that affect the degree to which I can fund the project.

So, sure, Patreon income is good. Is the hope with this change just that forcing people to wait two or three months instead of one will make them more likely to buy access?

Well, not really.

It's certainly possible, but I'm not convinced that the difference between 'one month' and 'two or three months' is actually that significant when somebody is considering whether to back the project or not. In any case, the time between subsequent free builds isn't actually changing; they've been targeted at two to three months per so far and, with the help of today's double release, will continue do so going forward without interruption. This change isn't aimed at the absolute delay of the Patron release, but the timing.

While I've been doing what I can with social media marketing and I remain deeply grateful for any word-of-mouth spread, a pretty overwhelming portion of the project's visibility comes from its visibility on Itch.io. This visibility happens almost entirely around anything tagged as a major release, which is to say the public builds.

So, the project gets the most eyes on it thirty days after the Patreon build's launch.

Or, put another way... it gets the most eyes on it exactly when there's never a patron build available to new readers. It is this specific discrepancy that the change in release cadence is aiming to address. Of course, ideally it could be addressed by just putting out a new build every month, but that is fundamentally not possible while meeting the desired bar of quality for this project.

With all of that being said, I don't imagine that this is news that anyone is excited to hear. Nonetheless, it is my hope that it will ultimately leave the project in a healthier state going forward. It was important to me that the shift to this model not include a sudden gap for free readers suddenly needing to wait one month + a build cycle, and it is for this reason that plans for today's double release were put in place before the release of chapter 4. I want to deeply thank the artists whose hard work made pulling it off possible. Whether you're a patron or a free reader, it is my hope that you'll enjoy the chapters to come; there's some exciting things in store.

...With that being said, hey, chapter 7! This is still a development update, after all.

Art briefs have already been out for a bit; as part of the big end of part one reshuffle I also implemented some process improvements, so with only a couple exceptions art briefs are currently out for multiple upcoming builds. That said, 7 in particular has some challenging components so I wouldn't be surprised if it falls on the longer side of build timelines. For our higher tier patrons, I'll be taking a hard look at the survey on Behind The Scenes content and hopefully have something new out within a month or so, besides of course getting the full resolution assets for chapter 6 up.

Separately, there's been some interest in from a few folks in a digital soundtrack, prints, and similar available. A soundtrack does pose some challenges, as the game contains a mix of stock and custom music; the most likely format will be a sort of 'selected tracks' version that contains only the actual custom tracks by Benny. That said, it's something I'd still like to make happen, though the exact format is yet to be determined. I've also done some preliminary research into getting prints done and believe there's a viable path forward, though that's certainly going to be on a longer timescale.

That's about all I have today! If you haven't played the new build(s) yet, then have fun!

See you around,

Faintly