Everstone Daycare - Plans for March

Howdy everyone!

I appreciate all the kind feedback I’ve received on the last demo. People being happy with my writing makes me feel more confident and motivated in my own work, and I hope to continue to improve as the project goes on. There have also been a fair few typos that I’ll make sure to correct in the next pass through.

With my last month being the first time I was able to work on the game full-time, I ended up overestimating the amount of work I’d be able to do and underestimated the amount of time it takes to write the actual script. This, along with it being the shorter month of February, caused me to have to delay the demo I promised in February and it being released in the first week of March. I’ll try to reel in the amount of work I do and adjust my pace to hopefully prevent this from happening in the future. I’ll try starting slow for now, and once I’ve gotten a good sense of what I can comfortably do in one month, I’ll pick up the pace again.

I’ll try to break up my process into several smaller goals that I’ll complete during the month. This is so I can hopefully report on my progress more frequently and be more transparent about what goes into making the next demo. This will also allow me to better measure the amount of work I end up doing in a period of time.

Here is what’s were planning to work on during this month

• Make adjustments to the UI - I still have some issues regarding the UI, particularly how crowded it can feel, especially when there are multiple characters on screen. The biggest issue, and the one I want to tackle first is that the side-buttons that are anchored to the top-right of the text box didn’t convey their purpose as easily as I thought they would.
• Cleaning up the code - The way I have the scenes programmed and named are a bit messy as a result of being made in a rush during the last few days of the month. I want to take some time to re-do most of it so it’s easier for me to parse in the future and easier to link and reference to.
• Character Themes - In the music front, the next tracks we plan to focus on are leitmotifs for the main nurses in the cast. We will start off with Nurse Buizel and work our way from there.
• Set up Itch.io Integration - I recently learned that a Patreon account can be linked to an Itch.io account, allowing me a centralized place to upload demos for the game that are accessible only to Patrons. This will make it easier for me in the long run, though I’m willing to not go through with it if it ends up making things inconvenient for everyone.
• Continue writing the story - This one is a bit harder to quantify, but my intention is to start writing the beginnings of the main story route the player will take after getting out of the intro. This one will definitely have a lower word count than the whole intro, but will feature new CG art by Spooky nonetheless.

Thank you again for all your support!