You must be registered to see the links
Before I go into any details for my plans for the year, I would like to thank everyone who has supported me in any way since October last year. I had no expectations/ideas of how it would turn out when I made something completely new to me available to the public and the majority of the reactions have surprised me very positively. Thank you for that.
For everyone who supported me monetarily, let me tell you that as cliché as it sounds, I don't see the amount behind it, but the time of your life you spent earning it. To me it's like opening your window, throwing money out and hoping it will be caught by the right person. I really appreciate you entrusting this to me, a complete stranger on the internet and for some probably on the other side of the world.
Releases
A brief outlook on the year ahead. For anyone who hasn't read my slightly longer post on the games future, I'm planning 3 releases this year.
Chapter 2 - March/April
Chapter 3 - July/August
Chapter 4 - November/December
These are rough dates and may vary depending on the length of each chapter. A length of between 2-2.5 hours feels good, both when writing and playing. Therefore, you can also expect similar lengths for the upcoming chapters.
Each of the chapters will have a slight focus on one of the Li's, as I want to create a closer relationship with the characters in the next 3 chapters after the first encounters in chapter 1. This will involve going into more detail about the characters' life events so far. Don't worry, this won't result in the other 2 getting less content than seen in chapter 1, but rather that the focus character gets a bit more.
Game Improvements
In terms of the game itself, I've gathered some feedback after all the release phases of chapter 1 have been completed. All in all, most of it was positive, which was nice of course.
The one thing I'll take away in general and try to implement better is that the choices don't feel like choices and that the outcome of what I’d call positive choices is too positive. In terms of interaction and choices, I'll try to add more/more realistic ones based on the situation if I doesn't ruin the story by doing so. It's a bit more work but I can see how it can improve the experience.
In terms of meaningful choices, which to me translates to “create story branches”, I'm very careful about. Most of the games I've loved have destroyed themselves through excessive branching and that's “the” mistake I never want to make. If it pushes the game more towards kinetic novel, then so be it. Story is the focus for me, and I do everything I can to make it make sense.
Patreon Changes
As far as Patreon is concerned, I have no real desire to change anything. The number of tiers and the prices seem reasonable to me. The only thing I would like to add is another service for you. The game will get quite big and will exceed the download limits of any service, at least in the “original” version. As a result you will have to suffer through throttled download speeds. I don't want you to have to wait a long time for the download. Therefore I will split the links for the Patreon and Public Release so that I can activate bandwidth sharing for you subscribers. I will add an upper limit to that, understandably so that if someone shares the link with the public, the limits are not used up within minutes. This way you can always access the game data as quickly as possible, with the speeds the service I have chosen allows to. I will update the tier descriptions accordingly in the coming days. The change will be active for chapter 2 onwards and is for all tiers. Everyone who supports me should benefit from this.
Personal Goals
Personally, I want to be braver and better, especially in terms of image editing, lighting and camera angles. I've been a bit more cautious here in the past and have already built a bit more flexibility into chapter 2. It won't be huge leaps, as I don't want the game to look different with every release, but I will try to increase the quality step by step.
My big goal for this year is to be able to animate myself. I've already added some of my own animations to the scene in chapter 2 (3 of the 10 used are mine) to better link the purchased templates. By the end of the year, I want to be able to animate complete scenes myself so that I only have to call on help for complicated positions. This will allow me to make the scenes more interactive as I can quickly throw in my own animation if the scene needs it.
In terms of story and writing, I think this will simply improve with experience and practice. I notice with every script I write that I find it easier, and I just keep at it.
If you have anything you'd like me to look out for in 2025, just write me a message.
