Slight Delay and Next Month's Update Plans

Hey, guys! So I think I mentioned earlier that I got off to a late start with May's build because I spent the first couple of weeks focusing on getting everything prepared for the itch.io launch. This build is going to be on the smaller side of things because of that, but I think I'm going to want to delay releasing it for another day or two so that it has a bit more substance to it. Since the last time I asked about this, the poll seemed pretty unanimous towards minor delays for more content, I'm not going to bug you guys about it again and I'll just go ahead with that.

Another reason compounding the delay is that I've not been really happy with a lot of the work I've been doing for this build and scrapping and reworking a lot of it. For instance, this cliffside background is one that I practically finished before scrapping it entirely and starting all over again because it just wasn't working for me.

In the meantime, I'll let you guys know what you can expect when the build does release in a day or two. The updated story content will include the incomplete paths on November 22nd and 23rd for Asher from the 0.1.1a build. In addition, I've been playing around with some new VST plugins that were recommended to me by one of my players and have been working on integrating them into older tracks to improve them. It's a bit of a slow process as just swapping them in with no tweaks doesn't sound great, but over time you'll hear more tracks get a little upgrade here or there. (At this point in time, I'm just working on replacing drum kits, acoustic guitar, and bass guitar plugins. More instrument swaps may come later.)

Here are some examples:
A Shoulder For Your Burdens (0.1.1a)
A Shoulder For Your Burdens (0.1.2)

This track took a couple of hours of tweaks and is finished and ready to swap in.

Dead End Road (0.1.1a)
Dead End Road (0.1.2)

This track has undergone a few hours of tweaks but still needs some work done. In particular the guitar sounds pretty awful, the bass might need more work, but the drums are fine.

(Apologies for the quality on those MP3s, by the way. I compressed them twice in and attempt to fix the ID3 tags so they might sound a little off for that reason, but the files used in-game are .oggs compressed from wavs, so if they do sound worse than usual, that won't be reflected in the game.)

As for what's coming up in July's build, the winner of the poll was Asher/Colby content, so there'll be a focus on adding additional scenes for them. If possible, I'm going to try and sneak in a Noah scene as well and maybe one of two possible sex scenes I'm planning on implementing. (I can't make any promises there, though.)

In addition, in response to some player feedback from the surveys there's a few other things I'm going to be doing. One of them I've already gone over (improving the music through updated VSTs over time.) I'm also going to start the process of converting character sprites into dynamic images (a feature added to Ren'Py during my hiatus) one character at a time, and during that process I'm also going to take that opportunity to touch them up and make them look nicer.

The most common criticism I received in the survey was players want more character interactions. I also received some hand-written feedback about the messaging system feeling underutilized and players wanting to have more decisions to make. To address this, I'm going to start using the messaging system to do more than just decide path branching when characters aren't face-to-face and extend it to have some short, casual conversations with characters who aren't currently in the scene. This will hopefully help flesh out the characters a bit more, give you more choices to make, and it'll also give more opportunities to rack up relationship points with various characters.

I also want apologize for not having teaser screenshots for this build ahead of time for you $10+ patrons, but hopefully you guys understand that I've been kind of up against the wall this month and was not really able to deliver on that. The build should be up some time on Wednesday at the latest (possibly earlier depending on how many of these placeholders I end up replacing and how many revisions I might have to do.) Thank you for your patience!