Roadmap going forwards
The status of the Kickstarter
So, if you've been following the progress of the game recently, you'll know that I recently set up a Kickstarter to try and get some additional funding. You'll also probably know that the Kickstarter was unsuccessful, only hitting around 70% of the goal. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a bit bummed out about it, but hey, what's happened has happened. At the end of the day, I didn't do a good enough job with the social media and marketing aspects of the game, so to an extent this isn't too unexpected. (Or maybe my game just sucks, lmao).
Anyway, in spite of the campaign not hitting its goal, I'd like to thank everyone who supported it through contributing to it, spreading the word about it, or in any other way. I've said it before, but it bears saying again - it really does mean a lot to me that people helped out, and I really can't thank you enough. I want to get the best possible product out there, because that's what you all deserve.
With that out of the way, here's a rough plan for how things will go from here.
The roadmap
Sort out the CGs for the game
The only major asset that I don't have for the game at this stage is a collection of CGs, for showing off important and dramatic moments in the story. At this stage I need to assess what money I can afford to spend and then what sort of artist I can get based on that; either one of the existing artists or someone new. Between finding an artist, their schedule and backlog of work, and the time for the actual artwork to be created, it's difficult to estimate how long this will take, but if I'm being overly optimistic, I'd like to think that it can be done within two to three months.
In the alternate timeline where the Kickstarter got funded, I'd also have liked to get some more character sprites added in, but as it is things will stay as they are for now. Depending upon how things go for me financially, I'd definitely like to revisit this idea down the track.
Finish off the writing
Two pieces of good news for this one - firstly, the majority of the game has been written out and programmed in, and secondly, some early testers have provided me with feedback. I'm in the middle of writing out some additional stuff right now (which itself is nearly done), and I'll have some more feedback to go through before long, but for the most part, the writing part of the game is done. I anticipate that this can all be finished off in parallel with the artist creating the CGs, so this shouldn't cause any delays in the development cycle.
Release the game
Yeah it's...kind of that simple. There's a handful of minor programming things I need to do after finishing off the writing stuff, but the bulk of the work has been done at this point. The most important thing is getting the CGs in and addressing feedback, then it's basically ready for release. Neat, huh?
Updates and bug fixes
Naturally, my beta testers are only human, so there'll probably be the odd bug or typo that they miss that get caught by players, but they should be easy enough to fix. Other than that, I'd also like to try adding in some features to the game that were originally stretch goals once the game is out, but for now the priority is getting the vanilla version out.
Other information
I think I mentioned in my previous post something about updating the UI styling for the game - I've since gone back on that. Turns out, updating the game's styling for only a portion of the story is a bit more difficult to do than I anticipated, especially doing it in a way that doesn't then affect the rest of the UI when in the main menu and other sections of the game. Ren'Py veterans, I eagerly await your comments explaining that it's actually quite easy to do.
Also, I had a look at some stuff on my website and realised that the contact form has been broken for a while. Oops! Apologies to anyone who tried submitting things through it - it should be working now, so I hope nothing important was sent.
Take care, and thank you for taking the time for this. Your support is acknowledged and appreciated.