Hi everybody!
Happy WaLday! Today is the sixth anniversary of us releasing the 0.1 version of What a Legend! after having sat on it for three weeks (I created a Discord account on the day I finished the coding, 7th of April) because the second (and final) person who tested the build for bugs told us not to release a game in the second week of the month. I don't know if that advice contributed to the success of the very first release of WaL, but I know that just over a month later, I quit my unsatisfying and painful job as an English teacher (painful because I had to do a lot of jumping and dancing while having a necrotic femur) and started working on this crazy story we're still telling to this day.
Six years in, and it's still surreal that this is the job, and hopefully we'll keep doing it for as long as people want us to. That's you. Thank you to all of you who have had our backs through it all. I had forgotten to buy cake or champagne, so we'll open the bottle tomorrow, but we did take half of today off, taking the kids to the swimming pool. And it was great. A great anniversary for the project that has let us afford spoiling them every now and then in ways we couldn't afford before WaL, rent our own place, and, more importantly, expand our little family.
Now the weekly report:
I had planned to finish all major changes to the 0.8's content by the end of April, and while I'm done with most of them, I need another week. The reason? I over-corrected and cut too much. Without spoiling the plot completely, toward the end of 0.8, the MC and Holly are in a bit of a tough spot, and to stall the antagonists from doing antagonist stuff they start chatting them up, giving the player three convo dialogues. That was long. Very long. I removed them entirely. The problem is that now the ending comes too quickly and without enough tension, leading to a less satisfying finale. Anyway, I'm going to have to think of a way to build some friction and make the ending more interesting.
Chestnut has been busy fixing artworks. In particular, she has been very unhappy with one of the sex scenes (which I haven't yet animated, in part because I knew the art may change). The issue is that we're trying to show too much of Holly for the benefit of the player, and in the process have stretched her body beyond what any human being not made of rubber is able to do. Trying to make the art more believable (without having to redo the whole thing) was one of the things she focused on last week. She also worked on new art for the new sections added in the polish phase.
That's all.
I hope you all have a great, great weekend.
Cheers!