Status update Unforeseen consequences CYOA

Hello dear cat pack.

I felt it is time for a status update.

The last couple of days I have found some time to work on the CYOA again.

So there is one good news and one maybe bad news:

Good news:

I have finished a lot of pages, I am not really sure how many, it's kinda hard to count them since I intertwined the different paths by using the same twine sections and differentiate between them with if statements.

Since this produced up to,  idk, 6 different paths in the same twine section it's hard to find out how many pages I added, so I didn't take the time to find it out.

My estimation would be 50-60? Certainly feels like I doubled the game content.

Bad news:

Even though I am currently extremely happy with the way I managed to string the different paths together, I cannot feel like it is clean enough at this very moment to release it.

I therefore make the choice to postpone the next release for now and will do some more fine-tuning (and also proof reading).

This is the first time I know a release would be too rushed and hurt the readers.

So please bear with me for now, I promise what you will find when I manage to put it out will be worth it.

Sidenotes/Patchnotes for now:

• Historisation of version changes, although for this one the addition is so massive and like mentioned above "complicated" that I set the continue button at a fairly early point. There are 3 main branches starting from the "continue with version 0.22 button", all of them have some major addition to them (and some more to follow before I release it).
• Slight changes here and there to text and pictures.
• Massive addition of pages/text/images/videos.
• Development note > finally found a good way (at least for me) to work with variables. Really jumped up the quality of working with the sections.

I will put the following notice somewhere in the game as well but:

You should read/look at perks very carefully from here on.

Decisions matter, it might seem like you ended up in the same place (like I said, some sections have up to 6 variatons as of now), but how you treated someone or acted in a certain situation actually might come to bite you (or help you) in the long run, even though the result seems the same to you at the moment. If you read the text carefully (or pay close attention to the perks) you can assess characters current situation and stance towards you or others. Also I made sure to ever so subtly alter their decisions based on what has happened in the parallel universe of the different path.

I am also trying my best to keep a consistent timeline -> taking an item from the enemy for example might give your team the minute to find another item which in another path they would not have found, therefore altering the outcome completely. It just wouldn't make sense that everything between paths is just drastically different from one moment to another without any reason, so I went with the butterfly effect approach where little things build up to huge changes later on.

This is also a reason why I will probably wait longer for new releases, the poll back a few weeks ago showed you wanted bigger packages anyway, but by now I feel like they need to be way bigger to immerse into the story and give me time to be more consistent between the paths.

I really don't want to hurt the story by forcing paths out, but it takes lots of time and focus to stay consistent between other paths (I sometimes have all of them open to compare them and might small changes). If there is one thing I hate then it is illogical character design or story events that don't match up (looking at you Game of Thrones Season 7 & 8).

Enough rambling, this text alone could have been two more pages ;P.

Hope you all stay safe!

See you soon with the new release.