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It's the "Good news!" update...
Well, hello!
And good news it does appear to be as, for once, I'm not going to prattle on about development, graphics design, rectifying gameplay faults or, indeed, anything problematic. Instead, I'm going to talk about releasing content.
I can wait a moment if you need to pick yourself up off the floor?
Ready? Ok then...
The "cut to the chase bit" is that in a couple of weeks I'm going to start putting up fresh downloads. There has been some discussion with the testers over whether I should wait until we had absolutely everything tested and cleared and then do a single drop or whether, since we're testing each refreshed chapter in order, update as we go.
Given that there is a lot of new content in each chapter, even if only animations, I decided that I may as well release chapter by chapter. After all it has no impact on the final release date of Five and the only real difference is that completed work is available for you if you want it as opposed to just sitting on my hard drive.
Of course, this also puts the decision in your hands. You can download each chapter as they come out or simply wait until Five drops and do a single download then. You don't need me to make that decision for you. As discussed before, chapters will be in both HD and compressed versions for your convenience.
Releases will be every couple of weeks, sometimes even weekly and will be in the following order:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Strip Philosophy Ping Pong*
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
New Trailer
Chapter Five
Secret Project 2**
Bonus Pack
Why not release work now? Why the couple of weeks?
To allow a bit more time for testing and animation corrections. Once I start dropping content I want it to be consistent and frequent.
Heavy Five was always a complex little game and that's even more so now. There is still some work the testers haven't seen and I want the final product to be as perfect as possible for you and so I want a little space to ensure the guys have had sufficient time to try and break it. On animations
(and, crikey there are a lot of those) although I'm happy they play smoothly enough I also want to ensure that there's nothing I've missed. i.e. no small clipping or other errors which haven't been noticed. Bugs are quick to fix, animations less so. Hence a bit of padding timewise.
Plus I have some admin to do. I need to re-jig the Patreon page (
Patreon are doing some format changes so I need to completely update it), clear a ton of messages and generally clear the decks and do some housekeeping before I start dropping releases.
Do I need to play through everything again?
No. In doing the re-design I've worked pretty hard to ensure that this refreshed version remains compatible with your old saves, building the new interface on the old code. The only thing that won't work completely with your old saves will be the "all game achievements" module as this required a different set of coding. So my advice, for what it's worth, would be to do a playthrough on the new version just to see what is new and then use your old saved games as you see fit. But it's your call of course.
How much more work is left to do?
Testing and, any, animation corrections, a bit of re-wiring on Chapter Five and some work on the two "secret projects". That's it.
What on earth are the "secret projects" and why have you done them?
Well, they're a secret? So....
But I'll go so far as to say that one of them is additional in-game content and the other is something useful.
Do you have a solid date for Chapter Five?
Yes. But sod's law if I say when, no doubt something will go wrong. I'd rather not tempt fate at this point.
Does this mean you're going to start charging again?
Not as yet.
Charging will remain off until Five is released. You didn't ask for this work to be done and even though it is a massive improvement on what we had before and makes the game a whole lot better, it doesn't feel right to me to expect you to support it.
And I think that's it from me for now. As an aside the new working hours are working a lot better for me, dev-wise that is. Whether I'll continue doing it once all of this is out of the door I don't know. Crunching "real life" means I have less time during the week for things such as Discord, Twitter etc (
hence my almost complete absence from social media gubbins of late) so we'll see. What I do know is it has allowed me to be able to focus more of late and nail some of more complex stuff a lot more easily. But so far as the above goes, it was the right call. I should have probably done it earlier but "Shoulda, woulda, coulda" doesn't get you anywhere does it?
Thanks once again for your continued interest and patience. Stay, or be, lucky.
Notty
* Given the show it's based off is in Chapter Two, it seemed a good idea to drop this here.
**Not a typo. There's also a Secret Project 1, but that's hidden in Chapter Five. I've been a busy little bee...
