Hi everybody.
Happy Friday! I hope you're all feeling well and had a great week.
Last week, Chestnut and I went through the content of 0.8 and evaluated the story, characters, the pacing, the humor, etc., to see whether it works as a piece of adult entertainment or not. The short answer is 'yes, but it requires more polish'. Here's the longer version:
Initially, I believed I needed to do a lot of editing and rewriting of character dialogues from the first half because I wasn't sure of the voice and the progression, but fortunately, Chestnut disagreed and really enjoyed most of the first half. Still, there were some changes necessary: one of the craft quests wasn't working (we had two), a sexy cutscene from early on was a bit forced, an extra mud-wrestling incident felt repetitive, and two smaller events felt grindy and had to be joined together. I estimated that I'd be able to do all the fixes in about two weeks. After spending three days on them, though, I'm happy to say I'll be able to finish them by Monday, so a lot faster than I had thought.
When it came to the second half of the content, however, the changes will require more art, coding, and writing. Here are some of the biggest issues:
We aimed to let Holly wear her sexy outfit (decided by this Patreon poll) as much as possible, but that didn't match the feel of the event and felt out of place.
I incorporated a lot of the lore and background information in one of the final dialogues, making it too long and killing the action.
I had missed a big plot hole in the final step of the 'think' quest, namely that given that the events take place near the Old Capital, the MC can ask Kevin, Rose, or Gomira for help, trivialising the final challenge.
The MC's character is too passive in a few essential incidents, observing Holly rather than joining her. That's out of character for him.
We spent several hours today drawing up plans and solutions. The upshot, however, is that I will need more than a month and a half to polish and test the content, so we won't be able to hit the end of March deadline. The good news is that I think most of you who have liked our previous updates will also enjoy 0.8, and even Dear Celestina's section, which had been a bit divisive earlier, is now a lot more enjoyable.
What's the new deadline? I will spend the rest of Feb doing nothing except fixing stuff, and that will hopefully let me better gauge how much work is really needed and what can be a more accurate and final release date. My hope/suspicion is that we're talking about weeks and not months (0.8 is definitely not 0.7).
To all of you who are disappointed that we're going to have another delay, I share your feelings and am really sorry about it. This is 100% on me. I wish we didn't need the extra polish so that we could finish in a month and a half and go on a short break, but we do. What I can promise is that I think the content will be worth the wait.
That's all.
Have a wonderful weekend.Cheers!