Weekly Update 2019-01-17

Teaser Scene

A final teaser scene from the Amanda update. This one from her blue path. Just hanging out, watching some TV when a visitor arrives. Welcome company in the lateness of the hour? Depends on your preferences I suppose.

Progress

Strides, massive strides. Though to be honest it’s been a bitter sweet kind of week. While we’ve made a lot of forward movement, it’s become increasingly clear that the structural changes we are making to the game won’t be backwards compatible.

We’ve looked at what it will take to modify an old save to work with the new internal structure of the game and the amount of programming involved could be better spent developing more story. As with anything programming related, it’s all possible, but the payoff would be exceptionally costly in terms of development time.

However, we’ve spent this last week really fine tuning the new process and it’s going exceedingly well! Using Layers and custom built objects to control the visuals has allowed us to combine the writing/coding/image-integration phases together into a single process.

So now we only have to touch the script once when we initially write it and again when testing the images and making bug fixes and minor adjustments. What was once three separate process is now one, and it’s exceedingly fast. This means moving forward we’ll be producing content faster than previously before. However, we have to bring the rest of the game up to “code” so to speak.

Since we can’t roll out the changes incrementally as we originally planned, we’re going to open the throttle and burn a shit-load of mid-night oil bringing the interface back up to speed. It will require you to restart your game, but we’ve been looking very far ahead with these changes and can’t conceive of a reason we’d ever have to ask you to do it again. And, there’s a touch of good news.

While the changes you see as a player will mostly just be cosmetic, we are making serious alterations to the way the game stores and uses data. This is really the part that isn’t compatible with old saves, but to us it’s important because it will allow us to export and import character data much easier. Why do we need to import/export this data? Glad you asked.

The intention was always to make this game part of a larger series, with multiple MC’s coexisting in the same fictional universe. Now let’s say you are playing the second or third game in this series and you find your new MC interacting with one of the characters from this game. Maybe it’s Roger, maybe it’s one of the ladies. To make your personal story more cohesive, we want to be able to export the character as you left them at the end of DAST-001 so that they are faithfully represented in the next game in the exact same manner in which you left them here.

That’s one of the biggest reasons for the technical update. We needed a simpler way to get that information out of this game and into the next. And since this game consists of a large number of choices and elements we need to be able to do it efficiently with as little overhead as possible. We don’t want to write 150 lines of code when foresight and planning at this stage here can let us do it in 5. But the best news is, we’ve done it!

Now obviously this isn’t a benefit we’ll get to enjoy in the near future. But when the time comes, it’s comforting to know that all the pieces are in place and we’ll be able to execute it with little to no effort. It’s exciting stuff that is really driving us to hit this game hard and get it done so we can move on to the next. But we won’t move ahead until we feel that this game right here is done correctly and is the best we can make it.

And so the work goes on.

Current Poll and Wallpaper

We’ve had to go on a temporary hold with this just for the next week or two. Since we can’t make the next update backwards compatible, we want to focus all of our time and energy putting all the pieces in place so that this is the only time you have to restart our game.

But once we get this next update out we’ll return to the normal flow of business sometime around the beginning of February. So hang tight just a little longer because we’re busting our asses over here.

New/Old Tiers

So we’ve reopened some of the old tiers upon patron request, but the rewards for the higher tiers remain the same as the $5 tier. So at $5 you still get all the benefits and rewards, but if you want to give a little more, you have that option.

A special thank you to those patrons that have chosen to contribute heavily to this project. We are eternally grateful.

What’s Next

Since the new changes aren’t backwards compatible we’re doing everything we can to get this new structure distribution ready. We can’t put a firm release date on it yet, but it will be before the end of January. We’ve been developing it in parallel with the regular story, so when it drops we’ll have the Amanda scenes, Nanami scenes, and we’re going to see about throwing in a bonus scene as well.

So we’ll be a few weeks off than originally planned, but we’ll get you something meaty before the end of the month for certain.

As always, thanks for checking in with us.

We stand by the notion that our players and patrons are the best in the business! It’s your enthusiasm that keeps us going.

We at Ianvs Salute You!