r3.7 What and When?
New version is out! No game breaking errors (that anyone has reported), time to talk about the next version and what's gonna be in it and my guess as to when you can expect it!
As always, the when part first. It seems we are in the three month release cycle for good so, three~ish months from now, Oct/Nov is my guess for when we might see the next Unity drop. Ferdafs did say there was also a delayed Jessica scene he might release on it's own, alongside a mind blowers fix. But this has pretty much never happened, so I don't expect it. As always, if we do magically get it early, I'll add it in (no need to update for MB, the Renpy ones all work).
Heads up that July is going to be a packed month for me. Part of why I was in such a rush to turn this version around was that I simply don't have free time for all of July. I'll pop in on this thread 1/2 times a day, but my posting will be much lower than normal (and there was much rejoicing) as mostly I'll only be able to spend time writing response at the end of my day before I passout (such as right after this).
Onto the what. There are several tasks still ahead that need doing. The main priority for me is going to be continued work with my editors to improve the game dialogue throughout. While I expect this to largely be typo corrections, and rewording to make my ass-backwards dialogue makes sense, I hope we can also improve some story elements as well. The second big task is doing all the blinks for all the sliced images. The code is all there (and technically, they are already blinking in every image, those blinks are just transparent, so you can't see them), but I need to draw roughly 5,000 of them... So... I'll get right on that... I'll start in the latest content and then pick and choose the easiest ones after that.
At the moment, no new scenes, or big sweeping changes (I really want to avoid mucking up saves (ever again, but that's unlikely) at least for a long while if I can avoid it). No big plans for any additional features (the game is already packed with them) although I may continue to improve existing ones.
Lastly, I want to touch a bit on the next release and a very likely change to to the turn around time. While nothing is set in stone, I would prefer to give my editors more time to review and respond, and make the whole process a bit less of a mess on the back end. I've been working alone of this project for more than a year (almost two years in fact... hoy shit...) which means the only limiting factor has been my own time when I do an update. With other people, I need to build in some extra time for them to do work as well.
This means that it is very likely that, with the next release, the implementation time will be longer than a week. How long, no idea. As always parts of it depend on how much content there is, but whatever happens, I will continue to give progress reports as to where we are in the process and how long I think the work will take when I have confident estimates.
Additionally, update only patches will return for the next release as well. So those of you that would prefer to only have download 50MB files instead of 800-900MBs, will be able to do some once more.
I hope you all enjoyed the last version. I'm curious how helpful the scene selector and new do over systems were for you. And if anyone liked/used the uncompressed images patch and it is something I should keep doing going forward. Feedback is very helpful as I can't read minds (that you know of).
Anyhow... stay awesome!