Weekly development update
Alright, v0.9 has been released and as you might be able to guess, I'm quite relieved about that. I still think that there are some things that could be said about the road towards that update but its probably best to just turn the gaze towards v0.10 and let 2024 be 2024. I am very much motivated to get some pace back into this game but I'm not going to make any promises or anything like that right now. As I said before, let me have to prove it to you.
Now towards v0.10: The next update will be that last one of the first episode (or season or whatever you want to call it). This won't have any story implications, its just because I don't want people who discover the game for the first time to have to download too much at once. Still I don't think it will be entirely unfitting to have the last update of the first episode be the one that completes the cast of girls.
Initially my plan for finishing up the episode was to remake some of the old scenes to bring them in line with the current visual quality/style, maps and models, but I don't think that after v0.9 I can afford to waste time on old content and I'm more so in the mood to make new stuff anyway. Maybe I'll just do a "Episode 1 – Definitive Edition" at some point in the future, I don't know yet.
What I want for the first episode however is to get it feature complete, so that I can just use the same template for episode 2 without having to worry about any of that stuff anymore. The features I still want to do is to remake the gallery for it to be more user friendly, a walkthrough toggle, a new phone system and maybe some more textbox options (like font size and stuff like that). Should there be any more features you think would improve the game now would be the best time to suggest them as I will be very reluctant to add new things once I'm done with episode 1.
Apart from that all, I haven't really started any concrete work on v0.10 yet. For the most past I just spend the past week relaxing, reading the feedback about the update and polishing v0.9 a bit more. I also started the doctors office map (which isn't going to be very big since I'll add it to the city center environment) and did the tiniest bit of writing regarding the scene structure for v0.10.
I've talked about it a few times before already, but my goal for the updates from v0.10 on wards is to get the in-game days to be a bit less dense with content. Pretty much making the same amount of stuff happen but spread over more in-game days so that in-game time passes a bit quicker and we won't need another 2 irl years for the 2nd in-game week to finish. As I said before though, no promises. We'll see how it turns out once I get to it since I really don't want to compromise on dialog and slice of life stuff and in general I have my issues with keeping things short.
I'll start working properly on the game again tomorrow, first getting the stuff done I still want to do for v0.9a and then I should be able to start with v0.10 pretty quickly. We'll see how much I get done till next Sunday, but I'll probably post a character preview of the last side girl anyway.
Anyway, for the return of the development updates and to compensate for this wall of text, here is a little render I've been sitting on for some time now.