It's been a while since I gave a proper progress report on v0.13's development, and I have some good news and some bad news. I'm a fan of ending on good notes, so let's get the bad news out of the way.
First, we're something like 8 weeks into development for v0.13 and it isn't done. That's not super great. There are two main reasons for it. The first is that I spent about three weeks working with Berkili on reworking Companion of Darkness' first chapter (he said it's fair to blame him for that, so if you're upset v0.13 isn't here yet, go leave a 5 star review on his itch page and tell him how great the new Chapter 1 is, he'll hate that). If you aren't tired of hearing it already (or haven't heard it at all) - I do this full time. Working with Berkili took a lot of financial pressure off of my October, and he was genuinely great to work with, so I don't regret taking the job at all. If you genuinely dislike that I have to take on other work to keep my bills paid, you can support me on Patreon or leave a tip or buy early access on itch. Early access is even on a discount for the Halloween sale until November 2nd. If I make enough money on my own work, I don't need to worry about taking on new work.
The second reason v0.13 is taking longer is that I got sick, so once work on Companion of Darkness was complete, I couldn't focus on work to save my life. I did get a few things done, but it's an amount of work that should've taken me two or three days, not an entire week. I am thankfully at this point over the cold and am able to concentrate again, so work is progressing much more smoothly.
As a lesser issue, but one with a silver lining, I wasn't very happy with how the "interrogation" portion of the segment played out, or with how the following segment, where you'd learn about the events of the succession crisis that lead to current events, followed it. So I threw away roughly a week's worth of work. The silver lining is that I'm much happier with the new version. The old version included the succession crisis in a very forced way, isolating it from the story so that you could solve the murder of the previous Master Bancroft. The way it ended up, it didn't feel connected to the mystery at hand or provide any clues to help solve it. In the new version, the succession crisis serves more as character motivation, and you learn about the events as a part of questioning the suspects. I do have some concerns about how difficult it is to pick up on the clues for who the murderer is now, since some of those were replaced with this new information about the past, but things should come together pretty quickly in the second half of the segment. Hopefully I get some feedback about this when I get a test build put together.
Speaking of a test build, onto the good news. Having to reconstruct the segment the way I have means I know exactly where I want which things to happen, which has streamlined development significantly. I'm very happy with the way the investigation and questioning portions play out, and I think there's a good balance of the game mechanically remembering what you've found and you (the player) needing to remember the details in order to correctly solve the mystery. I'm not entirely happy with the way I have the game remembering clues, because it's difficult to call out specific clues, but I think I've found a way to work around that as well. I just need to build the segment out far enough to test the ending.
I've also got most of the rendering done for the new scenes, which I'm hoping to have implemented later today. Once I hit that point, there's still one more investigation segment and the final reveal left to put together. As of right now, I'd put the segment at roughly 65% done. The reveal at the end will have a few versions, based on whether you used the "Phoebe easy mode" and whether you collected basically all of the clues or not, then the story for v0.13 is done. That means that unless I hit a pretty serious roadblock, I should be able to get a test build finished and out to VIPs on Patreon for this Friday. It may not include the final reveal where you can make your attempt at solving the mystery, but it should include everything else with (hopefully) full functionality.
Of course, that does leave all of the smaller things that I should really do for the release but will likely end up skipping so I can move on to working on v0.14. Things like updating Emily's shop with the next set of Contracts you should have access to, making sure the v0.12 trophy is obtainable in the way I intended it to be if you don't obtain it during the segment, making sure the trophy for v0.13 is obtainable after completing the segment, and building out the second cult segment complete with its own side content to find. The cult segment in particular is something I want to at least have the story for, but with how delayed development has been on v0.13, I really want to get the story completed so you can play through the segment yourself. We'll see how it all goes - now that I'm finally over this cold, getting work done is much easier than it has been for the rest of October.
No comments:
Post a Comment