Development Update - 13th February 2021

Hey there! I've decided to post this development update ahead of time to let you guys know what progress has been made in the past week, in case I won't be feeling well enough to do it on Sunday. I won't post the fully finished Stats UI in this one, because most of this week's work has been on drawing the scenes I've written already and on the last quest of the village, The Festival.

Progress on the art:

• I've drawn 3 masks for The Festival (in the attachments). Find more about them in the writing bullet points from below.
• I'm working on drawing the last scene of the Exotic Beast Hunting Quest. So far, there are two scenes that are drawn and the third one is halfway there. Only that.. the drawings are not as they used to be.
• To elaborate on that last point, there isn't going to be a single drawing per scene anymore. There is a drawing at the beginning of the scene, then the drawing in the middle of the scene then the drawing as the scene reaches its climax. To make the drawings more alive, there are going to be more of them per scene, so that both the text and the visual rendition feels more alive. Because of this, even though three scenes will have been drawn for the first quest, there actually are more like 6-9 drawings in total for the first quest, which used to be the number of drawings for 2 releases in the past.

I hope this change will make the art more connected to the content it's supposed to represent and will help you have an easier time imagining the scenes. The logical step after this are finding more opportunities for the animations and getting more skilled at making them, so that some scenes that fit an animation will have one while others have a more polished drawing.

Progress on the writing:

• As you can see, I've turned The Festival into a masquerade with the 3 masks from above. I won't tell you more about what the masks represent or whether they have a profound effect on the plot of the Festival's sequences (😏), but I figured you might want to see that I've been working on something more visual.
• And for my final point, I've really backed myself into a corner. Because the masks, being of alien origin, might have certain influences over the player, I had to plot unique plots for each of them and it turned into a little bit of a mess. My intention was that since this is the last quest of the party, it needs to be really good and to pay a worthy homage to the ending of the first chapter of the open-world gameplay mechanic. There are a bunch of sequences in this quest, like normal events that can happen at an alien festival and ways through which your character can play her role into them, so what I've tried was to add both depth and width to this content, which is a pretty difficult task. Here's what I've managed to plot so far:

Now I see that the depth & width combination I tried to achieve is pretty obvious. It's a much wider quest than the Exotic Hunt Quest (which has 40k words), and in the end it will have the same depth as well, because right now it's only like 40-60% finished.

That's most of what I had to say. It's not going to be easy to write all that into real content, but I'll work hard on making sure that it won't take too long. I did say that we can expect a release around 27th February, and while that's very doable it depends on how quickly I feel well enough to get back to work after the second dose of the vaccine.

From the perspective of a creator, content drought is very easily noticed and it floats like a dark cloud above my head. You guys have waited plenty since the latest release in December and I don't want to keep you waiting for much longer. I enjoy working on this game a great deal and I wouldn't want to lose your trust which is a pretty precious commodity to me, so as soon as I feel well-rested and I don't have some strange flu-like symptoms you have my word that I'll get back on finishing up the release. 🙃

Have a great and healthy weekend!