Day 15 & Everything That Led To This Point - The Documentary Length Post

Hey Patrons!

We're on the cusp of releasing our next update, and this one... it's the big one. This is the make or break moment of Tai's route. This is the update with the answers to all your questions. Unfortunately, resolution is still to come, but this update does so, so much to answer your questions, to prepare for what is yet to come, and to tell a complex and intricate story unlike anything we've told before in Sileo. We're definitely nervous, but feeling pretty good about the execution. This update is definitely not something everybody will appreciate, but it's the story we want to craft and the story we have worked so hard in writing Tai's route to get to. If you don't like it, we're sorry, every route will be different, and I don't think we'll be doing anything quite like this again with the other routes (unless it's super popular in which I guess we'll have to find a way!), we hope you'll come back for the next one. But for everyone else... we hope this is every bit as amazing as we've tried to make it!

Now, as I've mentioned previously, this update, in addition to doing something really substancial story wise, also does something else that's more than a little bit special. It's something that every single moment we've spent on Sileo had led to. I've been wanting to talk a bit (a lot) about it, but I've also not wanted to spoil the surprise. With that in mind however, I am going to be making this massive clusterfuck of a post here and now. 

Below is essentially a rambling documentary-length clusterfuck of a reflection on both the details which led to Day 15 being so delayed, followed by everything that led up to this particular moment in Sileo, followed by a discussion about what is so special about this coming update, why we've done it and what it ultimately means for Sileo. 

As a part of this discussion, we will be telling you what the surprise is along with a couple of very mild spoilers where absolutely necessary, but no spoilers that will ruin the plot, more just give you an idea of what to expect. Where these spoilers begin is clearly marked, so feel free to stop there and come back after playing the new build if you would prefer.

At the beginning of June, we shipped our 0.25/0.24.1 update which included Logan's Sex Scene and the beginning third of Day 15 on Patreon and everything leading up to it for the Public Release. In our previous update, we had updated the Day 11 Sex Scene with Tai to be animated instead of static, the first and currently only scene of it's kind in the game (we will do more when time permits!). One major issue with this however was that the animated stuff ran roughly, even on top of the line enthusiast-grade hardware. It was during the development of the June build that we discovered that the Model-Based Renderer which was a newer, more advanced renderer that shipped with Ren'Py 7.4, provided significantly improved performance for almost everybody during those animated sequences while completely eliminating the hitching and stutter on top of the line systems. We had initially made the decision to not enable this renderer at the time as CurryCatz' very old system did not support it, and no doubt a few of our players would have a similar issue. In the time since however, CurryCatz has gotten a new PC, and a number of new features that require this renderer have been added to Ren'Py. One such feature was the Tint Matrix which you can see during Logan's Sex Scene on his sprite - he's actually lit to match the environment around him rather than just being pure white like usual! There were existing and more archaic implementations of this feature, but none that worked with the way our sprites are built in Sileo, and none that worked quite as well as this new feature. This was the initial driving force behind enabling this renderer, but once we discovered that the renderer could solve the performance woes in the animated sequences, we went all in.

Now obviously if you were watching closely, you might remember it all went a little bit bear shaped (that was legit a typo, but it's too perfect to fix!) on launch. We had one issue, a crash to desktop on startup, as well as another issue in the form of a persistent traceback error which could be ignored, but was highly annoying nonetheless. Both of these issues were relatively uncommon, but both saw more than a few reports, and both needed to be fixed! One issue turned out to be an issue with Ren'Py 7.4.5 which we had updated to for that months new builds and was fixed in 7.4.6, but the other issue was a little more complex. With the help of PyTom, the head Ren'Py dev, we found the culprit: old files left over from Ren'Py 7.3, the version of Ren'Py we had used to ship all of Diego's route right up until 0.17/0.17.1 in December/January respectively. The issue was a set of files in the /renpy/common/ directory called 00shaders.rpy(c). These files were no longer shipped with Sileo as of the update to Ren'Py 7.4 in January/February, however some people had been overwriting the old builds since long before that switch... and the Itch.io client had been doing the exact same thing with every update, simply dropping a new update in the games folder and not cleaning up any data no longer present in subsequent updates. 

We investigated the issue and while telling people to fully clear their folders and install fresh resolved the issue, it still wasn't ideal. Furthermore, the Itch.io client nor their command line tools gave us nothing that would allow us to only replicate the current version of the game while disposing of old files. And so, with no other option, I began work on a proprietary compatibility system for Sileo which would specifically target and remove files known to cause problems (which unfortunately is usually something we find out about when it actually causes a problem, so it's a reactive fix rather than a predictive one) as well as cleaning up files and folders within the /game/ directory that shouldn't be there, such as the few times where we've mucked up and a file hasn't been properly archived or where we've changed our archiving strategy and some older files are no longer required. 

Now, I am sure you guys are as sick and tired of downloading the full build each and every month as I am, right? Yeah. It's not ideal, and it's one of the many things on my long long list to tackle, but basically, this compatibility system would (hopefully) work around the issues with the Itch client. We had also been eyeing up the Itch client for a while as a means to resolve this problem, at least for our public audience. And with this solution now in place, we began officially supporting the Itch.io command line tools with 0.26 which allows us to push smaller patches and updates, easily upload hotfixes with minimal fuss and allow those on the public channel to use the Itch.io client to maximum benefit.

As a side note, we are hoping to implement some kind of auto-updater for you guys in the nearish future. We're not yet 100% sure how this will be tackled, Itch does not provide the right tools to support our business model on Patreon, and the alternative would be to build our own systems into Ren'Py, either as an extension of Ren'Py's existing autopatcher implementation or as our own proprietary system. For this, we'll also need our own fileserver and systems in place to handle everything which could be a challenging, time consuming and even potentially an expensive task. Please bear with us on this! It's one of our flagship features planned for the 0.30 series of builds, but may not launch with the intial public release of 0.30. 

Now, with the facility available to clean up old data and with Itch now allowing for small patches to be issued without any major fuss, this opened the door for a lot of other changes. At the time, I was worried that the size of our archives (the images archive in the public version of 0.27a being well over 353MB!) would reduce the efficacy of these patches, with the entire archive being downloaded again if it contained any changes. Which, of course, it does, because every major update we release has new artwork! So, I set about restructuring the archives. Which in turn inspired me to restructure my script files, the files containing story and game data, to make them easier to navigate and browse - the 0.27a version of Tai's Route contains 192,236 words! Sometimes, navigating to a particular part of the story was harder than it had any right to be, not helped by our inconsistent and messy label structure (labels are like checkpoints in the story) which often had us manually scrolling through these colossal files to find what we're looking for! And having successfully restructured our routes into unique files for every day of the story, we THEN set about updating our labels to be more consistent both in frequency and naming! 

As a part of this, I also set about cleaning up the code for several menus such as the preferences screen and the save/load screen which were always held together by sticky tape and were a messy, convoluted pile of code that had been assembled in a time where I had practically NO concept of how to utilize Ren'Py's screen language and sloppily got the menu to do what I wanted via immense trial and error. As a part of this, another issue that I had tried and failed to fix during those early days was having more verbose descriptions on save files, more than just the game version and the time. This time, all that I have learned allowed me to make quick work of it, working around the inherent limitations Ren'Py forces me to work with when creating such a system (I could only use a single string to contain all of this data, a string that I could not name in any way, nor could I use other methods of storing data in Python such as a list, a dictionary, etc - just a plain text string!) and before long, I had a working system implemented! 

How cool is this, huh?

It was THEN that we discovered existing save files did NOT work in this new update due to the changes to the script files and labels. Some files would load, but the vast majority would not, and to say this was something of a problem for us would be an understatement. I set about expanding the system used to store save data and had it store additional data which could be used to rebuild a save file. While this seems like a lot of work to do something that should in theory be easy, I had combed Ren'Py's documentation extensively and found nothing to suggest there was an easier way. (Spoiler: There was). 

It was during the third week of June where I realized that my list of 20 things to fix, improve or implement had grown to 35 despite all the things I'd checked off the list, and if the July build was going to be on time (LOL), that work had to wait. 

So I then backported some basic under-the-hood features of 0.30 like the compatibility system and the writing of more elaborate save data against save files (the save screen in 0.2X won't read this additional data, but the data is there - which means, we can use that data to rebuild your save files in future versions!) and released 0.26. Then, of course, we released 0.27 at the beginning of this month to the Public. We'd been hard at work on Day 15 for a while at this point, but the Public update contains content we'd already finished for you guys last month, so that one could roll out without issue.

Take a wild guess what happened. Yeah. 0.27 had problems. This time, it was relating to save compatibility! Funny coincidence, right? Weirder yet, this issue had nothing at all to do with the changes we'd made - our best guess is that the files Ren'Py itself uses to maintain compatibility between updates had somehow become corrupt which caused a decent chunk (maybe not the majority, but a lot!) of save files to cause an error when loaded. With the help of PyTom (again, bless that guy seriously),  we managed to figure out exactly what must have happened and quickly retrieved the necessary files from a backup, replacing the versions that shipped with 0.27 and rebuilding the game as 0.27a. Ironically, before I turned to PyTom for help, when Googling for solutions to this specific issue (which is useless because Ren'Pys documentation is horribly indexed and Google is completely incapable of finding what you need, when you need it), I happened across a feature that, as far as I can tell, is completely undocumented... and made half of the work in 0.30 that I'd done for save compatibility completely unnecessary and instantly inferior! I now had a means to restore everything but the players position in the story. Saves made with 0.26 and newer now contain a record of the last label reached which will easily allow us to continue from a very recent point when this happens, but even saves that don't have this data will only need to restart the day with all other progress completely intact! Urrgh! Talk about a waste of hard work, but it was a valuable learning experience and it only went to make 0.30 a better update, so... all is well that ends well? 

Let's talk about what happened when work on Day 15 continued for the July Patreon Update.

So, one thing that was a big failing of ours in Diego's route was our planning, or better said, our lack thereof. Something that I learned very quickly when starting Sileo is that sure, you might be talented. You might be able to string together some fancy sentences. You might be able to write some really neat and intricate short stories. But these things alone do not a writer make. Storytelling is a critical skill for any fiction writer, and as somebody who struggled to stick with larger writing projects without an audience to read them, I had never developed those skills. 

Sileo right from the get go did shockingly well, and a year on, we're the number #1 Gay Game on Itch right now! We're also the #1 Furry game, and #5 among NSFW games, with only lovely ladies (or rather games containing only ladies) for company right up until #14?! How amazing is that?! 

But this also meant that right from the get go, we had that audience that I needed to be able to stick with long stories. The fact that people read it, and the fact that you guys support us on Patreon - this is why we do this! But as a writer with no storytelling experience, taking on a large visual novel project requiring those very skills... 

It's... been a learning experience to say the least. I've not been shy about considering Diego's route a failure, although I should stress that I am evaluating it on my own very firm metrics. As the person who made it, I am deeply unhappy with the product and there are many, many failures that made it that way. We went in blind, hoping that inspiration and passion would fill the massive gaps in our planning. We often didn't have enough ideas to fill a day and rarely had ideas that inspired me to write them. We changed major plot details several times throughout, with the ending changing completely late in production. There were plots lines we began only to end them early with no proper plan on how we would have handled them. There were ideas introduced and then left by the wayside (though many of these were intentional, IE: Spencer). You get the picture, I am sure. 

The important part is that I developed a ton of these storytelling skills from these missteps. And really, a failure is only really a failure if you fail to learn from your mistakes. By that metric, Diego's route was a massive success.

Going into Tai's Route, we had already performed a post-mortem and knew full-well what had gone wrong. And right from the get go, Tai's route was built with Diego's route's problems in mind. We had the foundational pieces of what would become his route resulting from Day 9 of Diego's when a certain Raven was introduced into the story, a result of turning what was originally a literal exploration of an abandoned building that just wasn't scary enough into a nightmare where we could bend the rules to our liking. While the initial details of what Tai's route would be about changed completely, some things never did. In particular, a lot of the core structure that makes up Tai's route is entirely unchanged. Since then, we've added a lot of complexity and detail to it, adjusted a number of moments and strived to make things better and better. But it is not an exaggeration to say that Tai's Route had more planning towards it during the development of Diego's route than Diego's route had at any point. And when we started planning the route out in more comprehensive detail after the release of Diego's finale, we crafted a detailed plan with many complex and comprehensive details. And as we begun development, we only continued adding to it, refining it, finding ways to make it better... and, well...

Diego's route was made to fit the conventions of what a visual novel route should look like. And after finishing it, despite my overall dislike for it, I didn't feel defeated... I felt empowered. From all that I had learned from my mistakes. For some time, I had a tentative 'lore' for the world which seemed jarring and mismatching for the world we had crafted in Diego's route. Beforehand, I had been of a mind not to use it. But... I was passionate about it. It was the sort of thing I wanted to work with. And so, I said to hell with it, and it became the foundation for the story of Tai's route. I had some crazy ideas about certain characters and their roles in the story. Once again, I said to hell with it, and crafted the story without compromise. And with our more comprehensive plan for Tai's route, we set about realizing those ideas.

As soon as development began on Tai's Route, rules were being broken in the very first scene. Originally, it had not been planned that Tai and the protagonist would essentially get together on the spot. This was something that I simply... did. Why? Because I could. Because lots of visual novels spent a lot of time with the pursuit, with the will they won't they. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. But Tai's Route was all about challenging convention and just going nuts with it. So, I did it. And when I pushed it to the team, it caught them by surprise... but they liked it! 

The development for days 6, 7 and 8 was largely more conventional. We had already planned that the two would separate on Day 8, as well as the first sex scene of the route taking placing on Day 7. All three of these days were written in a largely typical way similar to my process in Diego's route, however instead of a full sex scene, I'd written a very brief, scruffy and straight forward sequence in it's place, promising to come back to it when the artwork for it arrived.

The artwork came in on what I remember to be the 1st of February, with the build due to release the following day. It had been a long and difficult work day, I was tired, and with the artwork turning up so late and with no time left on the clock, I sat down to write it. But I was in a miserable state, stressed out to my limits, and the only thing that got me through was to embrace my insanity and lean into a lot of my craziest ideas. What came out was very different from the scene we had initially planned in a number of ways, and did a bunch of really crazy ridiculous things, like... playing literal tiger sounds during the sex. And then, I presented it to the team with an apology for the insanity they were about to witness.

...and they really liked it. wat. 

When writing that scene, despite the stress and fatigue and despite the madness of it all, I found something of a groove. Magic happened. Weird, sexy magic, but still magic! I found a flow, a groove, something that elevated the quality of my output. I didn't know what it was, nor did I know how to repeat it. But by sheer chance, the very next scene I would write, the rewritten version of the Day 9 Nightmare for Tai's route, captured that same magic. Magic that promptly disappeared the moment Spencer departed with the rest of Day 9 and Day 10 seeming somewhat half-hearted by comparison. Once again, I wracked my brain to try and figure out just what had happened to make those scenes flow so well, make their quality so much higher than everything else around them... but once again, I didn't know.

The month after that, we began planning for Day 11. We had 2 pieces planned, a sequence for Russell's introduction, matching the one in Diego's route but rewritten, and a Black Claws practice where the main antagonist of that B-Story would finally reveal himself. But in between, we had... nothing. No idea on what we wanted to work with. That was until I conjured up the idea for a camping trip and presented it to the team... only for it to promptly be swatted down 2 vs 1. They argued that a camping trip is planned for Axel and Dom's route, I argued that both routes can have camping trips, just like how every route has a nightmare. They argued that it just didn't seem to fit with the story, like it came out of nowhere and pushed everything else aside to be there. I reasoned that this wasn't a bad thing, the sequence with Glenn could just as easily happen on Day 12 and it would fill a big chunk of empty space. In the end though, I was outvoted, but my condition was that whatever else we came up with had to inspire me in the same way or it wasn't worth doing. And eventually, our deadline arrived with no new ideas on the table. And for the first time ever, I overrode the others, told them that we had to start writing then and there to have any hope of producing as much content as we wanted to, and then forged ahead with the idea. The others reluctantly went along with it.

I made a few posts here during the development of Day 11. It was the hardest day I had ever written. The largest by a huge, huge margin. And also, in my opinion, the very very best day I had ever turned in. But one of the reasons it took so long and was so exhausting was the fact that I wrote it once, then turned around and rewrote the entire thing again. The first version I produced simply wasn't up to standard. It provided a good framework to help create the rewritten version and provided fantastic reference which took a lot of the challenge out of knowing what to write, allowing me to instead put emphasis on the quality of my writing, the overall pacing of the sequences, the feel of the dialogue, the banter between the characters, the world building elements, and more besides. 

But you see, Day 11 also marked a major breakthrough for me as a writer. Because while the initial version of Day 11 certainly didn't have that 'magic' from before, the rewritten version was pure, sustained, unadulterated magic from start to finish. And this time... I had a pretty good idea of how to replicate it on demand.

It wasn't until Day 14 that I properly mastered this new technique of writing I'd stumbled upon. And what works for me may not work for others either. Quite simply, I believe that every writer will find their own magic in due course, and will then find their own way to summon that magic on demand. For me, it was all about my writing process and how I approached my scenes, and actually requires several different things to be true before the magic can happen.

The first of these things is inspiration, pure and simple. Every time I have achieved that 'magic', I have been inspired by what I am writing. Be it Tai's first sex scene, where I threw any restraint out the window and crafted something totally bananas. Be it the rewritten nightmare scene on Day 9, where I doubled down on the theming and world building, bent the rules even further than before and gave our wonderful Raven companion a warm welcome to the story. Or be it Day 11, where almost every single sequence in the day was bursting with inspiration, from the fantastic (imo) banter between the protagonist and Diego when they first hop into the river, to the character building moments during the long journey to their camping spot... to the sex scene that made Day 7's look tame, working in the importance of scents and making this not only a major part of the scene, but a major part of the plot going forward as well, as well as the introduction of (implied) bindings, aggressive topping for the protagonist, denial and even some pain!

And you know what's weirdest yet about Day 11's sex scene? I'm not really into any of those things! Seriously! I just went utterly bananas and did the most insane sex scene I could. And you know what? I couldn't be more happy with how it came out. And the same can be said about Day 11. My biggest critique is that the final sequences didn't get as much polish as I'd have liked, with those scenes being the only sequences that weren't completely rewritten from scratch, on the contrary, they were from the original, but with notable edits instead. Which all and all could have gone a lot worse, given they were the best parts of the original version anyway. 

And when I presented Day 11 to the team, excitedly telling them how proud I was of it (and them remarking that they'd never seen me genuinely satisfied with my work like that before), they came back to me... with significant approval! This also marked a change in our team dynamic. No longer do we rely on voting exclusively for whether or not we do something. Now, even with both CurryCatz and Kronos are against an idea or are concerned about it, I am nonetheless given the opportunity to forge on ahead and give it a go with the understanding that if the real thing doesn't change their minds about it, it either gets reworked or scrapped. And since then, I have forged ahead like this numerous times, exploring my wilder ideas and disregarding all restraint, instead leaning heavily into what inspires me about what I am writing and allowing myself to be ridiculous, crazy and utterly insane - because often, those things are what separates a passable scene... and an outstanding one. 

In addition to inspiration, another thing these sequences all had in common was the fact that they were rewrites - they all had previously been written once before. Day 7's sex scene had existed in a rough form before being reimagined into the monstrosity it became. Day 9's nightmare already existed in Diego's route, and simply was rewritten to be vastly superior and more expansive than before, using the original for little more than reference as not a single line of the original was reused, and the resulting rewrite more than doubled the originals runtime. Finally, Day 11 had been written once, only to be rewritten again. Interestingly, Russell's scene in the morning was already written in Diego's route and thus would be rewritten twice! The main reason for this is that it had so much added content that simply wasn't a part of the original scene. While the rewritten parts captured that magic, the new parts did not - only when the full thing was done over did the entire scene come to life in the way I'd hoped.

The final thing that I need in order to capture the magic is a carefully measured lack of restraint, resulting in a deluge of wild ideas. These wild ideas make the plot so much more interesting and so much more enjoyable to write. They challenge me, excite me, and most of all, they inspire me. That inspiration allows me to pour passion into the words, culminating over many long writing sessions where a brand new sequence is written, then almost completely rewritten using the original as reference, keeping only the best and more inspired parts bolstered with significant edits and scrapping the rest in favor of the newly rewritten version. 

And that... also explains why we've gone from pushing 3 builds per update, to pushing as little as two thirds of a day per update. It also explains why we've gone from the average day being less than 10,000 words in Diego's route with the longest day, Day 19, reaching 16590 words, to days like Day 14 of Tai's Route which is a whopping 48153 words! It's less so a case of our updates becoming shorter, and more so a case of our days becoming dramatically, dramatically longer and more detailed. The average day in Diego's route would meander from point to point with many details feeling like filler - which makes sense, given a lot of them actually were filler - while Tai's incredibly rich and dense days are driven by the overarching plot, filled with purpose and do not waste a single beat. Day 15 is exactly like that. There isn't a single moment in Day 15 that lacks a purpose. Everything from the morning sequence with Diego and Jay, to the meeting with tai, to the sequences that follow... they all have a purpose. I am proud to say that we have reached a point where filler is something we simply haven't needed in quite some time, and despite that, our days are bigger, richer and far more dense than ever before. 

And one last little tidbit before we proceed onward. This utter disregard for convention, the desire to entertain if not indulge our craziest and most outlandish ideas, and our constant drive to challenge ourselves? That is what brought you Logan's Sex Scene on Day 14.

That sequence was not a part of our plan at any point until work on Day 14 actually began. The three fighters that we had introduced during Diego's route, Jay, Russell and Logan, had quickly become fan favorites, their popularity outstripping even major characters for which routes had been planned for already. When we introduced optional analytics into Sileo, we could also see a metric of the popularity of these characters with a clarity we had never seen before... and while all three were popular, it was Logan who was the most popular among them. Jay was obviously introduced on Day 6 and we worked Russell in on Day 11, however we knew that we had to find some use for Logan. As the final touches for Day 13 were being applied and the month in question was coming to an end, I asked the team to think of ways he could be utilized. Unfortunately, I struggled to come up with anything, the only idea that I had thought up being much to ridiculous and insane to even consider. Kronos had nothing full stop. CurryCatz initially said that he had nothing... but then let slip that he'd had 'one' idea, but he didn't think it was a good idea. When pressed, he backed away harder telling me it was too stupid and to not worry about it. But I pressed... and as it would happen, both he and I had come up with the same, ridiculous idea...

Once he told me, he suggested right away that we should not do it. But by this point, I knew better. We had nothing else, the least we could do is humor the idea... at the very least, it gave us something to discuss and would perhaps lead to another, better idea?

So we began to humor the idea. What was the idea? That the protagonist would have a one night stand with the bear. Yeeeep. As we talked, ideas began to flow... very quickly, the idea attracted context and had some very interesting implications on the plot ahead. Very quickly... I was inspired by it. And strangely enough, after hours of working out the smallest of details... CurryCatz felt the same way. Kronos was absent for this discussion, arriving back the next day to discover the abject horror of what we had decided to do without him. Alas, it was 2/3...

And so with the time we had left available to us, we resolved to work in Day 14 up until that point. Our reasoning for ending it there was twofold. One was that there simply wasn't time to prepare the new artwork without a significant delay. And second... we wanted to see your reactions! We reasoned that if enough people were up in arms, we could yet change our minds. Of course, it didn't cross my mind the absolute shitstorm that would have resulted from such a bait and switch. But watching the flow of discussion among you all, it became fairly clear to me that the key concern was how this would impact the relationship with Tai, this being the key reason for an overall seemingly negative response. But it also appeared to be that most people were nonetheless very interested in the prospect of a sex scene with Logan. And of course, we had already worked everything out. We knew exactly how this was going to affect the story going forward (no spoilers though!) and knew that for all intents and purposes, we would satisfy peoples concerns while giving them a cuddy bear! It's a win win! Perhaps the most extravagant product of our insanity yet, but believe me, we've only just begun! This all ties into the plot in a rather sizable way, and we can't wait to show you all how!

So a great deal was learned creating Diego's Plot, but a great deal has been learned from creating Tai's as well. I know Tai's route isn't perfect, there are things I would change and do over, but compared to Diego's route, Tai's route is on another level entirely, and overall? So far, I consider it a success. I now have a process that produces results vastly superior to anything I have done before. I now have the confidence and courage to indulge my craziest ideas and use them to fuel my stories. I now have the trust from my team to be crazy, letting the results speak for themselves and earn their approval in practice. And I now know how important it is to plan ahead in great detail, to be able to freely express myself in my writing, and... how important it is to actually be able to look back and survey what I have created... but instead of disdain, with a smile. During Diego's route, I wouldn't say I was enjoying myself in making Sileo. I speculated that the reason for this was merely slice of life, that the genre and format simply wasn't to my liking. I poured my inspirations into my words when discussing what I wanted to make, but could never do the same when I was making Diego's route. And the solution was to develop more skills, to challenge myself, to stop at nothing in order to learn from what I have done before... but most importantly, to dispose of what was conventional entirely, forgetting what a visual novel ought to be, and crafting what I envisioned for my stories without compromise.

But of course, I spoke before about the crazy and unrestrained ideas which formed the basis of this plot... and I mentioned at the beginning of this insanely overlong post that Day 15 would be the day you get answers. Indeed, that crazy and unrestrained foundation that not only provides a great deal of context for Tai's route but also expands and details Sileo's entire world to a massive degree, this is all about to become known to you.

The minor spoilers for Day 15 begin here. We're also spoiling the special surprise this build has in store. Stop here if you don't want it spoiled!

Okay, so. As I touched on WAY before, the June dev cycle saw more than half of the month spent on technical work, followed by a desperate attempt to get Day 15 completed on time. Obviously, that went pretty terribly between the technical work and the issues with the public release, but there was another reason for the delay too... and I couldn't really talk about it a whole lot without spoiling a few little surprises, hence why the above bold disclaimer exists. 

You see, when development started on the remainder of Day 15, picking up from where the June update left off, we had 4 distinct sequences planned for the remainder of the day. The latter 2 are not important for the purpose of this discussion, but the former two very much are. The first of these two sequences was originally intended to be another nightmare sequence not unlike the one on Day 9. This would have started off dark and sinister, but become more and more comical as it went along. We even had a ridiculous plan to have Spencer sitting in a throne, quoting Dracula from Symphony of the Night...

...yeah, thank GOD we didn't end up doing that. I knew I wasn't inspired by it, or more so, I simply didn't have enough to work with yet. But we brainstormed to our limits and came up with only loose ideas... and already being so damned late in the month, I couldn't delay starting any longer. That being said, oftentimes merely forging ahead and writing something ends up being the key to discovering a vastly better idea, and this was the case here.

The following scene had been a sit-down with Spencer in his manor as he finally revealed the truth about everything. About himself. About Woodcrest. About Tai. About the world. Everything. It was a reveal we've had planned out in massive detail since before Tai's route even began, and we had simply planned for Spencer to tell the protagonist the tale, kind of like how he talked about Doomsday Clock Disorder on Day 13, except a LOT longer and more tedious... 

...yeah, thank GOD we didn't do that either. Instead, after penning the entire beginning of the sequence, a lightning bolt struck (kind of ironic given that there's lightning happening during this sequence in game too). Instead, the new idea was to blend these ideas together, using the dream sequence as a means to tell this story, before the protagonist would wake up and settle his final questions in reality. But you see... there's one massive problem with all of this.

It no longer made any sense to do it without artwork. I always knew the scene would be better with dedicated artwork, but with only a single artist on board, CurryCatz was tied up with other things including a myriad of new backgrounds, 2 new character sprites and more besides. This was the first scene of the new update too. It's not like we could just cut it short and use the following month to prepare... there was nothing to cut short! But then, I had another of my crazy ideas...

Those of you who follow us on Twitter or perhaps frequent our Discord may be familiar with an artist called Lisionary. He has been easily the most prolific artists drawing fanart for Sileo with some of his pieces being staggeringly beautiful! He has a gorgeous painterly style and a clear love for what we're doing. And I got thinking... this is a dream sequence. CurryCatz has his hands full. And if the art style were to suddenly become a lot more painterly... this is the one time that would not only make a lot of sense, but actually be a really cool way to do it!

So, I spoke with the team who agreed, and then spoke to Lisionary himself who was all too happy to lend a hand! So, we commissioned him to handle the artwork for this dream sequence as it tells the story of Sileo's world and many of the characters that inhabit it. In total, there are 7 completely unique paintings with 5 additional variants, making a total of 13 images all up. And they are more than a little bit gorgeous! 

This is not something we plan on doing often, but far be it from us to take an opportunity to do something different and crazy! And thanks to your guys support here on Patreon, we were able to afford to do it! 

I don't want to reveal any more spoilers just yet, although if you scroll up, one of these paintings can be seen in the thumbnails of those save files...!

Anyway, if you've read this far and not skipped any of it, what the fuck is wrong with you? Never mind what is wrong with me for having written it. I should have been putting the final touches on Day 15, there's still a bit left to be done, but I think I am world champion when it comes to becoming massively distracted by things, so here's this colossal monstrosity of a post. A lot of interesting reflections here, a lot of things I've never spoken about or gone into detail over before. And a proper explanation for why we're now slow as all shit with regular delays!

In terms of avoiding future delays, one skill I still very much need to work on is accurately predicting how long something will take. I always ALWAYS underestimate and overshoot which is a big part of the problem, and I know CurryCatz is always working up until deadline to get his stuff done too. Honestly, a monthly cycle is the best business model with Patreon in mind and it keeps people engaged and hungry for more which is fantastic, but a month is a very short turnaround for the quality of content we're aiming for now and it's definitely a lot of pressure.

I still want to finish Day 16 as my next priority once this build releases, simply because I know you guys want some resolution in this story and I want nothing more than to deliver it, but I need to have a good think about whether or not we will actually be able to finish it in the time we have left this month - it's another long and very complicated day, and a third of the month is already gone! Either way, I'll keep you guys in the loop with progress reports, and the July update will be releasing very soon! Both artists expect to have their final pieces ready sometime tomorrow and I expect the completion of Day 15 to more or less coincide with this. It'll then be a matter of testing the update, making sure that everything works in the way it is supposed to and putting the final touches on everything, and then we'll be releasing at long last! All going to plan, it will be tomorrow, but I can't quite guarantee that just yet - fingers crossed!