Saturday Devlog (March 27)

Hello and happy weekend once again! Hope you're all staying safe and healthy.

Happy to announce that I've managed to lock down a date for the upcoming demo release: March 29th, or two days from now. There's still a bit more writing to knock out the way, and some testing to do on top of that--but I've been making good progress recently, and I'm confident I can release Demo 2.5 in that timeframe.

Let's run through the Planned Features section I outlined at the release of Demo 2.0:

• Roughly 10k words of new narrative, which will introduce the remaining members of the core cast.
• Revamp of choices for the first half of the demo, including all-new ones to reflect the expanded stat bar.
• New stat screen elements, including explanations for each stat (including the schools of magic) and a history of used spells including their explanation.
• Revisions to MC & NPC dialogues such that it will change according to what MC’s personality meters look like.
• Minor rewrites for whatever scene I feel could use it,
• Streamlined coding (which will have no visible impact on the front-end, but will make future demos less buggy & less tedious to write).
• Bug and grammar fixes.

Of these seven targets, I'd say that the only ones I haven't managed to meet are points four (referencing MC's personality) and six (streamlined coding).

The demo does already feature quite a bit of the former, and so the failure here is that I didn't manage to make a significant number of additions. This is mainly because I couldn't find the opportunity to place them, a part that is proving to be harder than I had initially projected. So this is an ongoing battle, and a goal I plan to revisit in future builds.

For the latter, it became a lesser priority because I had spent much more time hunting bugs than I was supposed to, and so I'm a little leery of the errors that a full code restructurization would introduce to the build. This will instead be implemented incrementally over the course of the next few updates.

That being said, it has been a productive two weeks since the release of the last demo! Here's how the project is looking as of right now:

For your reference, the last build had a wordcount of 87k words without code. This update is likely to gain another 2-3k words before being released, which brings the demo's total to roughly 103k words. It's an exposition-heavy update, one that will introduce the remaining members of the core cast and set up the story's next big action arc!

Other things in the works:

- Leon's portrait is forthcoming from the artist, and I should be able to show it off at the same time as or slightly after the release of Demo 2.5. Ilya is next on the docket, and then I'll be putting up a new poll sometime in early April to determine the next batch to be commissioned :)

- I'll be grinding out that side story in the last couple days of March. There is only one response on the request form so far, hence the lack of a poll. Though I'm only just now realizing that there have been additional Arcanist patrons to whom I have yet to send the form's link. Apologies! I'll do so immediately after this post goes up.

As always, I remain open to any questions, both via the comment section as well as through Patreon's personal message feature. Thank you for supporting the development of A Mage Reborn!