Hey guys! How's it going?
As always with the first dev log after an update, I want to say a warm hello to all of the new members here - I appreciate your support! I do these dev logs every couple of weeks, so you'll be hearing from me semi-frequently if you choose to stick around.
So, speaking of the update... 0.14, eh? That one was a doozy! I've had to be super careful with everything I say for months now to avoid giving anything away, so I'm happy that it's finally out! The feedback from you all has been overwhelmingly positive, too (thanks!), so I'm glad everyone seemed to enjoy it despite the less-than-cosy nature of the big surprise.
But of course, there's no rest for the wicked, and I'm already working on 0.15! I've just finished the detailed scene planning earlier today, so next I'll be starting the writing process in full. This one's gonna have a bit more of a girl focus than the last one did, with Sarah, Catherine, and Hannah getting most of the spotlight - though of course the others get a few nice moments too!
Other than that, most of my time has been taken up working on the public release version of 0.14 (0.14.2) - it's mostly typos, bug fixes, and a few additions to the character bios, however there are a couple of bigger-ticket items that have taken more work:
The first is the new day-select screen that appears when you start a new game. If I recall correctly, I first mentioned this around a year ago, maybe a little less, but it's finally finished! The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice the different chapters - those will be divided up with the time skips in between each one. And for those of you who are hearing about these time skips for the first time, you can find a much more detailed discussion of them in dev logs 46 and 47 if you're interested - but the short version is that they will just be a few months at a time to move the story along, and they will be handled carefully, with a very-detailed montage (100+ renders) covering the skipped time, so it's my intention that it shouldn't feel like you're missing out on stuff.
Now then, the other big thing I've been working on is a few fixes to some of the 0.1 renders - primarily the ones with Sarah in. Her initial model in 0.1 was just way too short. Over time she's gained a fair bit of height, so now I'm going back to make her model in the early stuff match the recent stuff.
I've actually attempted this a couple of times before, but the improvements I've made to the graphics over the years make any new renders feel completely out of place when they're mixed in just for the Sarah scenes amongst the other early graphics. To get around that, I've created a separate installation of my rendering software and reverse-engineered it to match the old stuff, meaning that the replacement renders look just as crappy as the originals. I never thought I'd be putting in so much effort to make my stuff look worse again!
I'm not sure how long this will take in total, but I'm hoping to get it into the public release in a couple of weeks. If not, I'll just continue plugging away at it in my spare time while I work on 0.15, so don't worry about new content being delayed for reworks or anything like that!
I think that about does it for this one. Until next time - Thanks again for all of your support, I truly do appreciate it!
- Cosy