As the holidays approach, and Chapter 6 is firmly in our rearview mirror, I thought I'd take a moment to make a few announcements.
Chasing Sunsets 0.7a (Bugfix) Released
This is not a critical update, as none of the bugs were really game-breaking, but this does resolve a number of spelling/grammatical issues, and also tones down the Chapter Summary statements if you chose certain paths after becoming more serious with Mallory.
Chasing Sunsets is Gaining Weight
The third announcement may be a bit more controversial: After flowcharting what needs to happen in Chapter 7, I do not believe we can comfortably fit it all in one chapter. After speaking with Kentyrr, I believe the best option will be to increase the planned chapter count to complete the game to Prologue + 10 chapters.
I know this may be frustrating for people who saw the story coming to a quicker conclusion, but we feel we would not be able to do the story justice if we tried to cram everything that needs to happen next into a single update. Alternatively, we could have just made a super-sized chapter, but we feel that regular content updates keep our story relevant. We're sorry if anyone feels let down by this scope creep.
Post-Release Developer Livestream in December
Next, I'd like to announce that we'll likely host our post-release Livestream on Dec 10th. As we get closer to stream date, we'll finalize the date and time, with no small deference to our host's availability. Please don't hesitate to begin posting questions for the Livestream in the #questions-for-dev-streams channel in Discord.
All are welcome, and Kentyrr and I love every chance we get to interact with fans of the story. We hope to see you there! We will announce the venue for the stream at the same time we finalize the date and time.
Chapter 7 Announced!
Lastly, I would like to announce the kick-off of Dev Cycle 8, as we begin working on Chapter 7, titled "Convergence."
It's time for the Campbells to start wrapping things up on Tonalu and begin to looking at returning home. As the chapter title implies, a lot of moving parts are starting to build toward a climax, and some of them will determine the shape of things to come.
Accelerated endings will become more common in the remaining chapters as the story moves into the third act. The echoes of choices made far in the past may return to help - or haunt - our protagonists.