SandStorm - Status : News of the week #30 [v0.6.3] or [v0.6.5]?

Hello

First, I would like to thank you guys, for your support in August. I know it is not easy, as in summer people usually have other priorities, so thanks again. When confidence is a bit down, it helps a lot to remobilize and keep going :). 

It's a strange feeling because I would like the work and the game to advance much faster, but instead, it's going slower as I am paying more attention to my renders, using gravity effects, deep of field effects, improving skin effects, paying more attention to lights, using smoothing effects for more realism on surface collisions. The story with the many routes gets more and more complicated to manage, and of course longer (but that was my choice anyway, I have to assume). Animations, if I want to make good ones, I have to work full time on it, but then there is no much time for anything else.

Anyway...to sum up, everything takes more and more time, even though I'm getting better and more experienced at it. As you probably already know, I am working only on evenings and weekends as I have a job in the daytime, not getting much room for hobbies.

I really wish I could find an animator to ease up the work in the future because the animations part is taking a lot of energy and time for mostly frustration as the results are rarely what we expect. It's hard to take pleasure from making animations (when you are not a genius at it, I mean). My strong points are the creation and the artistic part, which I always find pleasure in it, and I believe I'm quite good at it. Even the coding, I find it fun, I like maths and logic, so I enjoy those little challenges to find how to make it happen in Renpy. Obviously, I enjoy the writing as well, too bad I'm not 100% fluent in English, I would have been able to do much better, but I'm getting more and more help for that, so it's cool. 

Anyway, for once, I wanted to give feedback on what was my state of mind after 6 months of constant updates and almost 1 year of work, (as I started to learn DAZ, renpy and everything since last august). 

Don't worry, I'm still motivated to continue and improve, and to be honest, I can't wait to start episode 2, it will be very exciting, with a more solid technical base, which will make things easier to manage afterward. Working on SnowStorm has been really refreshing so far ^^, and it was a good idea to start now. I really needed to take some breaks from working always on the same stuff in SandStorm. 

Of course, the priority is still to finish SandStorm first, and I believe the endings of SandStorm are great, so I'm looking forward to making them real, and watch the reactions from the players :)

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Now that I said all that, I'm wondering how I should manage the next updates schedule. 

A/ I have a v0.6.3 which can be ready in a few days, and contains :

- Evil route progression with 2 sex scenes, and some answers on the mysterious cat lady identity. 

- Updated gallery with all scenes from v0.5.5 / v0.6 and v0.6.3 that weren't in the gallery

### This version will remain as a beta, for supporters only, it won't be proofread. Then we will jump to the v0.7 which will be a quite big update, for end august-early september ###

B/ Or I can wait a little more to have enough content for a v0.6.5 with some scenes on the romance/lust routes as well, this can be ready around August 10th/15th, and will contain :

- Evil route progression with 2 sex scenes, and some answers on the mysterious cat lady identity.

- Main story progression for all routes, with 2 major events (for which you already had teasers). 1 hot swimsuit event. 1 campfire event with some singing. Note that there won't be sex scenes. Those will be reserved for the v0.7 which will have a lot, like the 2nd night. 

- Updated gallery with all scenes from v0.5.5 / v0.6 and v0.6.5 that weren't in the gallery before

- I will make a proofreading session for that one.

### This version will be released in public, after a beta session for supporters before. v0.7 for early/mid September ###

C/ Or I release directly the v0.7, so I don't waste time making builds/marketing and such with intermediate versions, and you will get a full update at the end of august

- Evil route progression with 2 sex scenes, and some answers on the mysterious cat lady identity.

- Main story progression for all routes with 1 hot swimsuit event, 1 campfire event with some singing, a night session full of lewdness (5 or 6 different sex scenes), and a morning surprise. 

- Updated gallery with all scenes from v0.5.5 / v0.6 and v0.7 that weren't in the gallery before

- Of course, a big proofreading/beta session for that update, as it is a pretty decisive one.

### This version will be released in public, after a beta session for supporters before ###

I'm making a poll here, so you can give your input and your opinion on what you would like to get for Sandstorm in the incoming month, and also what you think would help the game the most. 

Thanks for your time reading this and have a nice week ;)

PS: I will show some teasers in another post later, this post is already too big lol