Development Update - 15th of Feb 25

Hey everybody!

This Week

Our new team member has done the initial lighting and optimisation of Part 1 of Ley's side path. We have a preview rendered in low quality at the top of the post!

The translations for the Gina, Kagome, and Yuki paths are almost completed now, so we plan to launch them on Steam later this month.

Last week, I mentioned that we hoped to have a demo for ACTC on Steam for Next Fest later this month. Unfortunately, this won't be possible. We apologise for this! After further work on it, we feel that releasing something later this month will result in an undercooked demo. We plan to release one shortly before launching later this year to truly showcase the features we'd like to offer in the game rather than rush to put something out now.

Overhauls & What To Expect From Us

I will be very candid about the issues we've encountered and will go into some detail about what you can expect from us over the coming months.

Similarly to the last couple of weeks, we've worked on improving our processes and fixing things this week.

We created some custom environments while we worked on Realm 3's main story. They had some technical issues, but they were workable, as there were only a few fully custom environments, and others were pre-built with some customisation. We were able to move past these technical issues relatively quickly during Realm 3, as we rarely built things entirely from the ground up, and we primarily focused on getting things looking nice that appeared in the shots.

For Realm 4 and ACTC, almost every environment is custom-built from scratch. We did this to ensure the game feels unique and that the environments fit what Tae intended when writing. However, this has come with complications.

As we began working a little more on the scenes in ACTC to prepare a demo, we realised that the way we were doing things was not sustainable. Our team member who works on the lighting, camera work, and scene composition (the final touches to make the shots pretty) was spending around 70% of their time fixing issues with the environment/characters/assets rather than solely focusing on making the shots look great. Them dedicating this amount of time to fixing problems instead of completing their core tasks worked well for nobody as it wasted time and was exhausting for the person fixing it. While this could be workable in the short term, we would likely see a loss in quality in the long run.

This issue is not the fault of any specific team member. It lies with Tae and me for not managing the situation as effectively as we should have.

We transitioned from just the two of us working on the game together, living in the same room, to hiring an additional seven people full-time and several others part-time who live all over the world.

Tae and I have always wanted to grow and improve what we're doing. We're very fortunate that your support here and on our other platforms has enabled us to hire people to improve things, and we're lucky to work with the talented people we have. Tae and I realise we hadn't scaled up our management of the projects as a whole as effectively as we wanted. We've always ensured we have plenty prepared in advance, however due to our mismanagement, some things are coming back to bite us, meaning that certain things will take longer to come to fruition.

That's why we've spent much time recently working to improve this and create smoother collaboration between our team members. Neither Tae nor I had prior experience in game development or managing a team. We take it very seriously, and we're taking the time to lay a solid foundation now so that SeptCloud can thrive for years to come.

We will release the side paths over the coming months; however, with the aforementioned changes, I won't guarantee monthly releases for the next few months as we have done for the last couple of years.

Nothing has changed regarding our priorities; we will just be taking some time to ensure that everything is up to as high a standard as we want it to be rather than releasing smaller updates with compromised quality.

We plan to complete the development of ACTC Season 1 and Realm 4 during 2025.

We have already started working on Realm 4. Almost all the environments are created, and we have begun posing the characters in them (no expression, no lighting – kinda like a storyboard). However, now we need to go back and fix all the environments. Right now, we don't know how long this will take.

I appreciate this may feel like too much information. We've decided to share these details with you here to keep you fully informed so you know what to expect from us and why.

Many of you supporting us likely expect us to release regular game updates. We could theoretically continue pushing out updates; however, ensuring the points below are ultimately more important:

• Having solid new workflows in place for us to release consistent content for years to come.

• Ensuring the quality continues improving and is as high as we can achieve.

• Assuring our team members feel happy about their work and are in good headspaces.

For those of you who have been around for a while, you'll know how keen we are to release regular new updates. It's frustrating for us to release slower for a while. However, we assure you that the improvements we're making will be well worth it.

We'll still be just as active here and on our pages during our process overhauls, but if we don't release a substantial new game update for a couple of months, you now know why.

We hope that you, seeing the improvements we've already made from the start of Realm 1 to the end of Realm 3, demonstrate our commitment to keep pushing for better quality.

Thank you so much for your continued support. We appreciate your patience while we organise ourselves. We couldn't be doing this without you! ❤️