Everstone Daycare - Progress Report (Oct. 10, 2022)

Howdy everyone!

Just here to give everyone an update on what we’ve been working on so far this month, and a little bit of a teaser of what’s to come!

First off, we finally uploaded the Mac version of the previous demo to the itch.io page. I was never informed that there was no Mac version available until recently, and I apologize profusely to all the Mac users that had been unable to play so far. The Mac version still contains a couple of bugs that we’ve not been able to find solutions for, primarily because of the difference between how the Mac and Windows versions of the program we’re using export the game. It’s nothing game-breaking or will prevent you from starting up the program, but mostly minor things like a pop-up when you open the game file looking for an unneeded file that doesn’t exist, or the font being used in-game being incorrect. Hopefully it’s not too much of an inconvenience while we look for workarounds.

We’re still primarily working on the new robo hands scene discussed previously. I’m currently having some trouble with writing it, but that’s now to be expected after working on the previous one. I’ll do my best to get at least this section of the game out in time though. All of the related art and CGs for this section are already finished, so all there is to do is finish writing and coding it in.

I think the difficulty I’m having might be because it’s a topic I’m both unfamiliar with and not primarily into (that honor would go to Spooky). Having to write the story mostly unsupervised outside of having a general skeleton to follow via the CGs and Spooky’s general descriptions. As a newbie writer, I think I should stick with what I know in the future to prevent artists block from slowing down my output and possibly delegate this kind of writing to the people who are more passionate about these topics (i.e. Spooky.) That’s it for the writing though.

As for the music, Tennet and I are still working on what will eventually be Ursaring’s theme. Music production has been a little slower with Tennet’s work schedule, and we want to make sure the character themes are exactly the way we like it. Most of the “general themes” that will play in most scenarios are finished, so we want to give proper time for any more personal songs to be done right.

Lastly, I’d like to give everyone a preview of a character that Spooky had been working on, Nurse Weavile! (We sure do have a lot of nurses now.) We’ve been getting a lot of demand for some role-reversal content to be included, specifically with Nurse Buizel, and we’re both big fans of the concept. It’d be a fun idea to have a line where you end up getting a nurse or caretaker “retrained”, just like you. Unfortunately, with the current main storyline we’re planning to develop, we can’t really commit to anything like that at the moment as we want to keep our options open to use the pre-existing characters in their current state (nurses as nurses, etc.) We want to be able to make the first “good ending” first, without creating any possibilities for characters to be in a state where they wouldn’t be able to fulfill the role we need them to in the story. Once we’ve finished our first main ending, then we’ll have the space to explore concepts like that, but for now, hopefully this idea will tide everyone over.

Nurse Weavile is a temp nurse, a “graduate” of Everstone Daycare’s Retraining Program and an old playmate of Gengar. He’s supposed to be the “bad nurse” that’s helping Gengar get away with his schemes and do a bit of bullying on his own, but you can enact karmic justice on him and bring him down to your level. It’s not exactly the same as doing it with a moe character like Nurse Buizel, but I hope it’s satisfying regardless.

Thank you again for all your patience and continued support! It really means a lot to all of us that you’re all still here.