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Roadmap for Act 3 - and Q&A answers!
26 April
Heya folks.
It's a good moment to combine answer some questions to questions you had, and questions you didn't ask but still deserve and need.
As such, we would like to present the honest truth for Act 3 as a get go, before moving on to the Q&A.
As it stands right now, we're posed with a genuine problem we're not in a position to resolve. As you might know and understand, Her Last Piece is quite heavy on the art division, and Her Last Piece has simply not been quite the financial success we have obviously all hoped for.
This is fine, this is not inherently the problem. The problem is what comes after. Our artist has sadly come in a position where he needs to dedicate time to other projects to be able to afford a daily life, something we had not anticipated for when starting this project, but life... well, life happens.
As it stands, the entire script is written, edited and proofread, and on the coding front we should not need a lot of time, I'd argue roughly a month, maybe two, considering most of the surrounding code has been finished already.
The problem is the art is so substantial, we're potentially looking at a year's time to get Act 3 done. We've looked at a lot of other options, but they either require resources or skills we lack. Hiring another artist is something we simply cannot consider, for example.
The only option we believe we have left is one we want to offer as an option to you, the player. We know it's immensely disappointing to have to wait a year, and it truly bothers us a lot too, but we'd like to look into changing the workflow a little to release Act 3 in parts.
This would mean the artist would finish a part, before moving to the next. These would be several scenes, culminating in about a third of the chapter per part.
In such case, the parts could likely release every 2-4 months or so, or faster if the financial situation lets up enough to shift the work schedule.
Additionally, we could release parts in phases as well, where we initially release a part only illustrated, with no animations except for those already created in earlier acts, and then the next update is focused on animating that part.
A release schedule as such would look like this, in that case:
Part 1:
1A - Illustrated
1B - Animated
Part 2:
2A - Illustrated
2B - Animated
Part 3:
3A - Illustrated
3B - Animated
It's of course hard to say how long every part/phase combination would take but we could offer you updates a lot more frequent, even if we can't offer you the full game.
Please feel free to let us know your thoughts on the matter. We're not perfect people, so perhaps you might have an idea that could resolve the situation in better ways which we haven't thought about, either.
We sincerely apologize for this letdown, but we want to stress that we will continue to finish Her Last Piece, even if it takes a year indeed.
Thank you.
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Moving on to the Q&A:
