Log inVersion 0.25 Complete - Final Overhaul & Eryn Path Improvements
Version 0.25 took a long time to wrap up, but it's finally finished and ready for play testing. This is a major milestone release for the project, and more or less wraps up all of the story revisions to the early game. There's still a little bit of tweaking needed here and there and the odd bit of placeholder art, but I think we can comfortably call it complete. This update turned out to be huge, and even with all of the cutting the word count is up from 66k in the last version to 78k now. At an average reading speed that adds up to about 50 mins of added gameplay across all of the routes in the prologue.
The new heuristic choice system, coin system, and all of the final game systems are also fully in place in the first act now. Under the hood I've also been fixing old technical debt from the start of the project that has been making it harder to maintain. Without getting too far into the weeds, when we started the project I made a lot of rookie mistakes in how I named things like variables that made it harder to add to later. Fixing all of those things is time consuming and not necessary to do all at once, so that has been an ongoing thing. I'd say it's about 95% done at this point. I was hoping to fix some of that related to gallery labels but I had to roll it back at the last minute because I broke everything. Expect a hotfix in the near future.
The story and structural changes are huge, but more importantly EscapeArtist managed to add a ton of new art this time around. All but a few of the placeholders we added in the last update have now been replaced with the final art. She also went to town on the backgrounds, one of which, Harth's bedroom, had been in the game since version 0.01 and didn't really match how far she's come since then.
Raisa's first h-scene was also reanimated and expanded with a new animation loop, probably the best in the game so far, and some shots of the environment cut in to spice it up. That's in addition to improvements and other expansion on her route, as well as on all of the other character routes.
Most of the changes fall on Eryn's path though. You'll find a lot of new artwork for her, and most desperately needed, a huge overhaul to her romance path. In the original story Harth seemed like kind of an oblivious idiot. In the rework his motives are much clearer, and there's a better escalation in their tension that will lead to a much more satisfying payoff in their upcoming new first h-scene. The writing is better, the tension is better, there's more artwork, just overall her whole path is way better.
The festival scenes have also been expanded heavily to capture the atmosphere. We wanted the festival location to feel huge. In the original scenes it felt like a little campfire with a few people sitting around roasting marshmallows, but now it really captures the vibe we wanted. We mapped and modeled the location in Blender and used that as a reference for all of the new artwork. Since it's a location that appears on every path and is at the peak of the first act, we decided to go all out in making it as good as we can. We have lots of camera angles and variations to really capture it. Also on Eryn's route the animated sighting of the other couple in the woods has been finished.
So here's what's next. I think we have about 8 art assets left in the prologue, and we'll probably release that within a month as a version 0.25b or 0.25c release. Shortly afterward we'll release the next mainline version 0.26 with the beginning of the changes to the second act. That update will be on the smaller side so that we can get it out sooner rather than later. After that 0.27 will probably be another big one, but not nearly as big as this one was. We've been planning a really big h-scene with Eryn but it's going to take place in a new location that we're planning to add in the 0.26 release. It's still kind of fuzzy, so expect a proper roadmap in the coming weeks. For now just know that we have some pretty cool stuff planned.
This release took forever because it was a bit of a moving target for us. It was hard to predict how long things would take. We've gotten pretty good at scheduling and predicting how long it takes to make artwork but for writing it's a lot more mysterious. We break everything down into scenes and list those out when we make our schedule, and it's easy to budget a certain word count per day or per week to write. What's harder though is predicting how many words each scene will actually be in the end, and it rarely matches up. There's also a bit of a whack a mole game that we've found ourselves playing, where you write 5 scenes and think you're done, but realize they don't work as well together as they need to and one needs more massaging. Because of that and the usual bumps in the road, the scope of this update turned out to be way bigger than expected. We both think it's well worth it though, and we know you will too when you play through everything and see how much better it all is now.
There's probably a ton of bugs in this one given how much was changed, so please hop in our discord or comment on a thread if you find bugs. Again, huge thanks to all supporters. Your help and patience with this huge update is massively appreciated and makes the difference for us. Stay tuned for the cool stuff we have planned for the game in the coming weeks and months.
