Chapter 8 and after, what's the plan here?

A good while back I promised to inform you about on what's going to happen with Light of my Life, and how the final stages of the story are going to come out.

Here's that write up. It's a bunch of text and it's a bit of a dry read, I'm sorry about that. There's a few moving parts, including some bits up in the air, and I'll try to tackle them one at a time.

Screw moving parts, Naughty: When chapter 8?

Look at the progress infographic on the pinned post. It updates weekly.

Okay, then how many more chapters?

At this point I've committed to having chapter 8 not be the final chapter. That's... not an entirely rational choice, but I find it hard to just wrap it up in one chapter, for various reasons.

So we'll get a chapter 8 and then a 9, and then some epilogue, or maybe a conclusion and an epilogue.

Also, I might decide to cut up the content after chapter 8 into smaller episodes since we're wrapping up at this point, and some of it is about fulfilling promises and eating your cake, and not really tied up in a bigger story, but that's one of those parts that's up in the air.

Er... did you read at the introduction bit I wrote here on my page, where I said I have no idea what I'm doing? Well, just reminding you because it feels appropriate at this time.

So what can we expect from this next segment of the game?

Well, it's a send-off, or at least it's supposed to be (even if the story is fighting me a bit on that at times), but it's also setting the characters up for a bright future.

It's tying up loose ends, and fulfilling some promises, and having your cake and eating it. And chapter 8 is about setting that up, as well as starting to dish some out.

It's probably not going to give you any of the big dramatic moments the previous chapters did, as there's not that much more drama to work through (even if there is still a little bit left).

So if Light of my Life is ending sometime in the future, any thoughts about what's next?

Yeah, I have. I created a few dozen elevator pitches for story ideas for a new VN over the past few years, a significant portion of which are the last year or so. I'll probably be pitching a few on Patreon and Subscribestar to see what strikes a chord and what doesn't.

I may even spend some time in between Light of my Life updates to put together some artwork or a demo at some point, perhaps even as soon as after chapter 8 is out. But it's a little too early to commit to anything just yet, first chapter 8 needs to be wrapped up and sent out.

What about distribution for chapter 8? Was that settled yet?

I think I may have remarked on this before, but if you missed that, here goes: the next parts of content will be a single, new install.

Why? Well, technically, it's become unsustainable to keep on adding new content to the existing game, and I had plenty of headaches over it when it was time to release chapter 7. Adding more stuff is just asking for the game to break in new, interesting ways at this point, and I don't want to find out that something breaks too hard to fix.

So the content for chapter 8 and next will be an installable that lives next to the installable that contains chapters 1 to 7, in its own folder, and you can keep both on your system. But you will be able to pick up seamlessly in chapter 8 from where you left off at the end of chapter 7, provided you ran through the ending with version 1.0 of later.

Note: some tech challenges remain with Android to get that last bit working (aren't there always?) but we'll cross that bridge when we get there, and at any rate it can also be played stand alone, defaulting a lot of the choices.

But you said jumping straight to a chapter doesn't work for LomL! What gives?

(going into some coding practices, skip to the next heading if that doesn't interest you)

Well, yeah. Yeah, I did say that. But I'm doing it anyway now.

The more accurate answer is that I couldn't do it for chapters 1 through 7, as they all live in the same code base. It'd be hell to figure out every bit a chapter touches and have appropriate defaults per chapter, especially if you have to shoehorn that in after the fact.

For chapter 8 that's a different proposition. It's a new, clean code base. So my developer's brain insists on making sure each variable that is referenced in code is properly initialized. That's just a matter of good coding practice. Basically, it prevents a crash of the application in case there's some unforeseen issue where a variable isn't correctly carried over from chapter 7, and a crash is to be avoided at all costs.

And that means that variable (which may be tracking a choice you made) gets a default of sorts that's appropriate for a given set of choices (which may, but will probably not be your choices) at the start of chapter 8. And that means technically being able to start a new game from chapter 8 without a chapter 7 save/export. So I might as well get over myself and give a user that option, even though I strongly feel you should continue from your last save carrying over your choices for the best experience.

Note, when chapter 9 is added, you won't be able to start a new game from chapter 9, since that continues on the code base of chapter 8, and I won't be adding additional chapter 9 defaults.

Last time, you mentioned support slipping?

(boring money talk, skip to the next heading if that doesn't interest you)

Yeah. That situation is unchanged from what it was last time I mentioned it. Support continues to drop slowly, and it doesn't look like it's going to level off any time soon. And I have little illusions chapter 8 will turn that around either.

Setting the Itch.IO store from pay-what-you-want to a minimum amount when chapter 8 came out helped pick up a little of the slack, but not enough to turn the tide. So, with neither Steam nor GOG panning out, funding continues to be a bit of a worry. Not enough to make me think of dropping the game, I might add.

I'm considering some options there, none of which should have any impact on how you as a backer get and play the game. If one pans out, that's great. And if not, well, we're no worse off than we are now. I'll share more about that at some later point.

Conclusions

After chapter 8, there will be a chapter 9, and something following that. It comes in a new installation that can live together with chapters 1-7 on your system. We may or may not be seeing some new stuff for whatever comes after Light of my Life completes when chapter 8 is released.