Steam Version - Progress Report

Hey everyone

It's been quiet here recently 🙂. But I've been working hard on the Steam version of the game, and giving it a few nice upgrades.

The most important part first: Eruption Imminent - Season 1 comes out on August 25th on Steam, and will be available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. Wishlist here:

We are almost at 5000 wishlists as of now! 🥳 Thank you so much and keep spreading the word!

Also: Check out the new game trailer on the Steam Store Page (I can't upload it here unfortunately).

Current Status

I'm currently in the last stages of implementing these upgrades, before the version is uploaded to Steam for final review. My goal is to do this before the end of the week, so that I can start properly working on Season 2 by next week. There might be more things coming up during the review, but I'm optimistic that I can fully focus on the next episode soon enough.

For Episode 8 (yes, it'll be called Episode 8, despite being the first episode of the second season) I have done quite a bit of storyboarding so far, so I should be able to start writing without much other work to be done beforehand. I know that y'all are impatiently waiting and asking for release dates already. It'll take a while, presumably until the end of the year or early next year. I'll start posting weekly progress reports again as soon as I've done a good chunk of the writing.

But now let me tell you what I've actually been working on since the release of Episode 7. The Steam version of the game will feature a couple upgrades that I quite like.

New UI

The new version of the game features a completely overhauled user interface. New menus, buttons, settings, icons, etc. A few of you probably already caught a glimpse of that in the Steam Demo. I'm happy with how it all turned out and I learned SO MUCH about RenPy's screens and displayables system while upgrading here.

Main menu:

Settings:

In-game:

Character Overview

As you play through the story, you now unlock Character Profiles from people you've met. The 63 character profiles update with new information as you play, to properly reflect the relationships with the protagonist, and the things you learn about them.

Gallery

The game now features a full gallery with all sexy scenes from the first season. Once unlocked, you can replay them from the main menu.

This one has been quite a tricky thing to implement, mostly for how choices work in this game. A lot of scenes contain a bunch of different variants that depend on your route, relationships and other choices. I think I managed to figure out a nice middle ground between giving you everything too easily, and locking everything behind a maze of complicated conditions. So smaller variants (like some changes in dialogue) are unlocked automatically when you unlock the main scene. More substantial variations you'll need to unlock individually (e.g. choices that are unlocked only for a certain route). I also added an overview for each scene where you can see all available variations and some icons to give vague hints on how to unlock them.

There are 97 unlockable scenes with a total of 191 scene variants.

World States

I added a menu for your Season 1 World States. A World State is added when you finish a playthrough of Season 1. This World State is needed if you want to import your choices in the upcoming 2nd season. The functionality for that was already added in the standard Episode 7 release. I now added a menu where you have an overview of all your World States and you can delete the ones you don't need any longer.

Achievements

There are 50 Steam Achievements that you can unlock as you play. I had a lot of fun finding fun things to add here. I'm curious how many of you manage to unlock them all.

Final Season 1 Non-Steam Version

There will be a final Season 1 release for supporters here as well, which will contain SOME of the new Steam features. This will mainly be the new UI and the World States menu. The other things (Gallery, Character Profiles, Achievements) will be Steam-exclusive. This version will come out sometime between the Steam release and the release of Episode 8.

Thank you for wishlisting the game!

❤️ Have a wonderful week! ❤️