1st Status Report of the Year

Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you had a nice (or tolerable enough) Christmas, and I'm happy to have you sticking around here :)

After the Full Release of the first part of Chapter 12, I've continued to work in the follow up beach house event to bring it to you as soon as possible. I'm working in several areas at the same time:

• Planning: I'm going over different ways of structuring the events, deciding what to include and where, and what plot points need to be advanced, as well as thinking on different ways to showcase character development through particular scene and dialog. There are many interweaving threads to unravel and placing them in order and tying them together is a slow process and I end up modifying and adding scenes as I go along. That's why I found the best way not to spend a lot time planning for stuff that won't end up being useful is to progress with the writing at the same time.
• Writing: I've also started writing the new chapter and I've completed around 3500 lines of code (which is about half of the original Chapter 1 length). However, the branches are much more dense than at the early stages, which means to portray accurately a character's thoughts and actions in all possible permutations I have to be very thorough and account for a ton of variables. This makes some apparently simple scenes really complex, and progress can be slow... Right now that and managing the growth of complexity are the main challenges, but I feel it's within my ability to keep weaving the threads. I'm trying to keep it slow but steady.
• Art: The art is usually one of the things I tackle first, and used to draw all the scenes before starting the writing. With time, and with the game growing more complex and detailed, I've realized it's better if I develop the art as production advances. Creating the art normally means having the full scene prefigured in my mind, but now I'm taking a looser aproach to it and draw images for several scenes as they start coming together. I'm also outsourcing some illustrations, of which I only draw the character's heads, to speed up the process. So far I have drawn and comissioned around 40 illustrations, and I'm expecting to add quite some more.
• Business stuff: The part I hate dealing with, but that needs to be done. I've been talking about a Steam release for years now, but so far I haven't found someone reliable that could provide some marketing services to do it in an optimized way and such. I need to look into it seriously, but that would mean taking some time off development and I can't leave that alone for long, otherwise I'm afraid I will lose track of everything (and the longer I take to release the more stressful things become). But I'll get around that and other management stuff at some point!

As always, I will keep you posted as I continue making progress. This is still quite a chaotic phase of the creative process, but the first bits of the game are already coming together. For this year 2024, my focus is still on this project and I hope to provide you with quality and angaging content that's up to the standards ORS has set, and hopefully even surpass them.

Thanks for your support, and I hope you stick around for another turn around the sun!