Falling Undercover: Nox Syndicate - [Episode 08] Status Update

Hello everyone! 😌

Hope you are having a great December, and those of you that celebrate are easing into the holiday season! We’re back again today with a progress update for all of you:

• Writing: 40%

• CGs: 3/6

• Animations: 3/8

• Additional Art: 1/3

• Coding: 40%

• Music and SFX: 30%

• Proofreading: 0%

• QA Testing: 0%

So, as you can see, we have a pretty full update planned, including the formal introduction of a new major character, complete with a new sprite. Since she's going to have more impact on the story than other newer characters, she’ll have a wider selection of expressions, and we need to structure the file to make future additions easier.

That being said, there is something important we want to address today.

Earlier this year, we realized that releasing an update every 30 days was simply not realistic for a project like FUNS. Because of that, we communicated an updated estimate of roughly 35 to 40 days per release, with the intention of keeping everyone informed and warning you in advance if we expected to go beyond that window.

What ended up happening, however, is that during the development of the last episode, the 40-day estimate started to feel like a hard deadline, both for the community and for us internally. This created a kind of pressure that has not been great for the project. We have found ourselves asking questions like whether a CG should be animated or kept as a still, or whether certain ideas should be cut entirely, not because they were bad, but simply to avoid extending development time too much.

In order to stay within the estimated 40-day window, we ended up working nonstop during the final two weeks. That approach not only took a toll on us, but also resulted in an update that required a follow-up fix to version 0.7.1. Furthermore, during that time, some members of our team received constant messages asking for the update as we got closer to release, so much so that it started impeding work.

Overall, we feel that working under constant pressure is not good for the game, and it is also not good for us. We want to be able to deliver the best NTR VN we can, ideally without feeling constrained by deadlines that push us to rush or compromise on quality or quantity, however we also don’t want to go too far in the other direction where the time between episodes extends too much.

As always, we would really appreciate hearing your thoughts on this, and thank you for your continued support and understanding.

Until next time, please take care,

Azienda