Expectations

For this development cycle I want to do things a little differently. Every couple of months or so, I will post a public update that will go over the status of the development of the next version of the game. This is primarily aimed at those who are not subscribed here on Pateron or on SubscribeStar in order to provide everyone with some news. The information below will mainly be about what I have already done and not about a concrete timeline or the exact date when the update will be finished. How long it will take me to do everything is very difficult to predict, so I can only ask you to be a little patient. The update will be released when it's done™.

Update Status

I have opted for the same development process as I did with the previous update and which has worked quite well. I have taken some time to really flesh out the rest of the game in pre-production. Before I started working on anything I wanted to lay out almost everything in Excel to have a clear picture of what I want to do. This is basically an outline of every quest and event that I want to have in the game. 

When I was happy with this structure I implemented these quests in game without the actual dialogue and images. Meaning that I have made only working shells of the events that will be later filled with the actual dialogue and images. Already I have implemented over 100+ quests that will serve as a backbone for the next several updates. Of course, not all of them will be finished in the next version, but I now have a clear path forward for the future.

With this all completed I have moved to writing the actual events. In this stage I have focused on the next update only and I have written all the dialogue that will be in that next update. This took me quite some time as the script for the next update alone is more than 100 pages long. However, this is not very dense text as the game dialogue tends to have shorter sentences. I have written about 50 new events that are very similar in length to the previous ones. I think that about 3-5 minutes of read time per event is in that sweet spot where not everything happens instantaneously, but also there is not much unnecessary filler.

With all of the game structure and writing finished I can now move to actually pose the characters and render the final images for each new event that needs them. And that is where we are right now in terms of the development progress on the next update. However, I want to also mention that making these images and animations is by far the most time consuming thing about the development. That is why I started with the structure and writing first, as this will make the images for the events way easier to do when the scenes are basically done. For comparison, it took me two weeks to plan and implement everything into the game for the next update, a month and a half to write everything and it will take me several months to render all the images.

See you in a couple of months when I have more news to share.

¬ The Goat