This dev diary was originally posted exclusively to patreon subscribers on 22nd September 2022.
Hello again!
Wow, 50 Dev diaries...where has the time gone? Thanks everybody for your ongoing support, it's been lovely seeing the positive comments recently, it really helps to motivate me.
So what's been happening this week I hear you ask? Well, work on chapter 4 has progressed a little further with some new renders in place and the entirety of the chapter 4 content is now shelled out. What does shelled out mean? We have a brief summary of every scene that will feature in chapter 4, what will happen, how the story will progress etc. We have a long way to go with chapter 4 or even with completing a "part 1" release but rest assured we are working hard and will update you when we can.
There's also something else I wanted to share with you today. You may recall if you read the last dev diary that we finally have our hands on a writer...a proper one. Well he has been creating dialogue for chapter 4 and has completely blown me away with his writing abilities. So much so that we have taken the decision to almost entirely rewrite the dialogue for the first 3 chapters. Now hold on just a second before you consider lighting the torch and grabbing your pitchfork...the rewriting process shouldn't absorb too much time away from the development of new chapter 4 content and believe me, once you get a look at it, you will totally agree how much better it is than the original.
We already have the dialogue rewrite completed for the entirety of Chapter 1, and we will be re-using the majority of the renders and animations. All that's left of the chapter 1 rewrite is the creation of some new renders to fill it out a little better. The dialogue is much longer in the rewrite (because it's actually written and structured properly) so in a scene where 10 renders was fine before, there might need to be 20 now for example.
I haven't set a timeline on the rewrite as it depends on various factors but again I will keep you updated throughout the upcoming dev diaries. We also haven't established just yet how it will be delivered as in alongside chapter 4 part 1, or as soon as it is ready (before chapter 4 part 1).
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR MY EXISTING SAVE?
This is the big question...
Firstly, once the rewrite is released I'd encourage everybody to start a fresh save ... why? Because then you can actually experience the rewrite in all it's glory. It's also important because there will be some fairly major changes to the story in the rewrite, so skipping it may result in some confusion going forwards. Plus, it shouldn't take a vast amount of time to replay as the game is still early in development.
I should also add that you WILL definitely keep all of your achievements, gallery images and replay unlocks.
I appreciate that some of you simply won't want to replay the game and that's totally fine. For this reason I have every intention of trying to make this work for you, however...
The Renpy engine isn't great when it comes to making changes to historic content. I am going to work my hardest to make it so that as a minimum, you should be able to reload your save game from the "pre-rewrite" as long as you have reached the end of chapter 3. Your save game MUST be on the splash screen that says "thanks for playing". This will be the "safe place to save". Any players who don't manage to get to that spot before the new version is released will still be able to roll back their game version in steam, play through to the end then save and then reload the new version of the game and continue. Again, I must however reiterate that THIS IS MY INTENTION, whether or not it is possible is a story for another day further along the line.
Phew, that was a bit of a mouthful. If you managed to make it this far then HERE is a chapter 4 teaser image for you.
Thanks again for reading and see you again soon!
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