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Heya people!
We’re back to posting regular development news, which means today we’ll share the current status of the next update, some of the plans for the future and other game-related stuff. Let’s start!
First of all, the preview that will be shared in the following post is about one of the characters, Colin Creevey, getting his own dialogue portrait. Since he plays (and will play) his role in the plot, we just couldn’t use the default portrait for him. We also made him a little bit more battered so that he actually looks like the creepy and suspicious type he is in the story.
Next, let’s discuss the most crucial topic - the release date of the version 0.9B. Recently, all of the tasks for the artists were outlined and now we can roughly estimate the time it will take to actually draw everything that is planned. For that the artists gathered together in Discord and all the tasks were assigned to each of them by Siserg according to artists’ personal preferences. After this process was done the completion time was estimated to be around one and a half months, give or take. This includes one new fullscreen scene and many smaller scenes that happen during the new side quest. Therefore, with these rough estimations, the release should happen around the end of march / start of april. We’ll keep you updated about this as we get closer to the release.
And now a couple of words about the events that will happen in the next update. As it was mentioned before, we will try to experiment a bit with this one and make one big side quest instead of several smaller ones. During this quest several unexpected things will happen, and there will be a number of interesting interactions between Marcus and main prefects. In addition, some of the (long untouched) side characters will be involved. Finally, there might or might not be more interactions with “not-very-human” character(s). This should surely spice things up a bit, as well as make the story more diverse.
We should also mention some of the more technical plans that we have for this upcoming release. First of all, it’s the update functionality for the launcher. We’ve recently started prototyping for this feature, and we’ll share more results as we get more tangible results. Next is the integration of the community translations into the game. Some of you guys were very fast with translating all the text, so we’ll try to finish this as fast as possible.
Finally, we will start implementing the Live2D functionality for locations. This will allow us to enable smooth animation for locations, such as moving foliage, blinking lights, etc. At the moment we have Live2D animations for one location (both day and night versions), together with the short scene that happens there. These are waiting for their insertion into the game. However, we also understand that animating the scenes is more preferable than the locations, so don’t worry, both of our animators (Nikky-Nikky and Grapefruit-sama) already work on that. As soon as we get a more or less stable Live2D model we’ll share a short preview in one of the next updates, so stay tuned!
Additionally, we still continue to work on fixing bugs you beautiful guys and gals report via Discord channel. We truly appreciate this since it helps us make the game better for everyone. At the moment, most of the bugs are related to either the old plot and some of the events there, or to minor errors and (most of the time) skippable crashes. Since most of the players were able to successfully finish the latest release, we won’t make another hotfix and instead include these fixes (together with new bugs) in the next release.
And now let’s vote! As you might’ve noticed (or not), in the previous release (0.8.4B and 0.9.1A) we’ve updated some of the existing models to make them a little bit more shiny and polished. More specifically, Snape’s, Draco’s and Dumbledore’s models were partly reworked, mostly their faces and emotions. Did you like the changes? Or were they so minor that you didn’t even notice? Vote and / or comment down below! Thanks.
As the development is gaining speed and we get more and more art finished, we’ll be sharing more previews and info in the coming weeks. Thank you for your support and feedback <3
Yours,
Team Sadcrab.
