Devlog (06/07/21)

Hey, y'all! Long time no speaky, huh?

Apologies for not writing this sooner, simply put: I wanted to wait 'til I had something important enough to show y'all, something to warrant me writing one of these. This stage of development is funny in that since the end of the game is practically just a string of scenes that are RIFE with spoilers, I can't really show off much directly.

But, I DO have a lil to talk about! So, talk I shall. :)

ROUTE 5 PROGRESS:

The final route is coming along nicely. The first half or so of the route is fully finished. Since there are recurring locations exclusive to this route, and all of them have appeared already thus far, the second half of the route WILL be easier to develop than the first! Hurrah! Here's a few screens from the route:

I'd love to show more off, but the further you play into the route, the more spoilery it gets. Also, in other news: A pal of mine tested the first half of the final route. He found a few bugs (which I have thoroughly squished), gave a lot of positive feedback (promising!) and some really good criticism/suggestions on things to change/modify (thankfully, most of which I can do quickly enough). So, yeah, first half of route five shaped up nicely!

Total progress!

This wouldn't be a Dialtown devlog with The Chort. So, lemme whip it out.

You know the deal by this point. The flowchart shows most of the significant scenes/events in each route, with green stuff being fully done content. Yellow = finished script/some assets, code WIP. There was also purple for placeholder assets and red for completely unfinished material, but those have been removed fully from the chart. :)

Progress has been great lately, basically. 24/26 endings done, whew! Not been getting much sleep, but hey,

That's Life!

Latest patch:

I'm also mentioning this as an aside, I uploaded a new demo patch late last month, just to fix some bugs and junk. I also improved some assets, redoing Billy/Gabby's poses from scratch and adding many more poses to their pose-pools. Here's a direct comparison so you can see what I mean. :)

Yep! I added head turn variants for poses that made sense and added new body poses. Huzzah. Oh, and there's a new song on the OST. It plays during Oliver's route, and you can find it in the demo portion of his route right now! Here's a Streamable link if you wanna listen to it right now! (Temp link, will expire 3 months from now!)

Musac Heore.

A lot of the code in the new update is experimental and may break anything and everything. But, so far, doesn't seem to have broken much, if anything. If it does, lemme know!

Let's address the elephant in the room.

Release plans.

Alright, alright, I thought the game was gonna release in Spring. But, I decided not to push for a Spring release (as the end of Spring approached), because while I could've just about made it, I really don't wanna rush the final release. I felt it was better to take the time to go back and improve some of the earlier assets, touch up the game just so the quality is somewhat consistent.

To err on the side of caution, I won't say what month DT is planning to release on in case there's set backs, but Dialtown releasing during the second half of 2021 is guaranteed. If I don't, fuck it, another video of me as a horse drinking hard liquor straight from the bottle. I'll even use a different Sinatra song (read legal notice above.) (But, no, I won't fail.)

This stage of development is always the hardest for me, to be honest. When you work on something for 2 and a half years (WOW,) it can be hard to see how good your game even is. Is it good? Who knows, it's just my weird mutant child who I kiiinda wanna ditch at the grocery store, y'know? But, I can say one thing for sure, after receiving feedback from my testers:

If you enjoyed the demo/Randy's route, then the best is yet to come!

Thanks for reading and dreaming with me and junk! As always, I'm a fucking mutt. Goodnight, everyone!