A small but rather important piece of information. 1) Weve been paid for the last two months. This has reinforced our financial stability. We dont know if this problem is solved for good but now when its become clear that we can lose our main source of income at any moment, Ill be very careful about handling our resources (though I always have been), so that if something goes wrong again, we can keep working for even a bigger period of time. 2) The work on the release version of the update is almost finished. It doesnt mean were going to release the update for the second episode any time soon. First of all, I usually leave the most difficult part of the work for last and secondly, organizing such a big update for the coder will take a few weeks at least, and thirdly the testing period will be long as well. Thats more or less how it looks right now:
And all these documents are almost finished. And as always, some of my personal thoughts. Weve received a lot of interesting comments under out last devlog. Its always nice to talk to those who leave some constructive thoughts. Heres an example: Episode 1 of Void's Calling was very interesting and it had a lot of replay value. I really liked getting a daily routine for the character to build up money and build up stats. I took my time to explore and I didn't feel rushed. I also appreciated the freedom to grind my character and build up stats. I was really surprised when Episode 2 of Void's calling didn't have as much freedom as Episode 1. I felt restricted. And heres my answer (this way more people will see it): The second episode wasn't initially planned to be like that. Initially, we had an idea to make a branching story with Kagera. However, we couldn't write it the way we'd pictured it in our mind. Realizing that things aren't going according to plan anymore, weve decided to try to give players more freedom in the castle. However, soon it became clear that weve made a huge completely linear story block prior to the castle part and a lot of players would probably have a hard time understanding what is going on. That's when weve decided to write a Fuhrim event where you look for Kagera, so as to create a visibility of an open world in the beginning of the second episode. That in turn took us a lot of time to pull off and the game was delayed, we had to redo a lot of stuff. I've said this a lot of times and will keep saying it, the game development process is a hard intellectual work and things don't always go smoothly. Can a developer make mistakes? Of course, he can, and he will. Can a developer see his mistake? Most of the times yes, at least if he understands what hes doing. We do understand. All developers want to make a good game. The problem is that we dont have a detailed script or plan for the game. Its impossible to make it now. Its incredibly time-consuming process and we dont have anyone for the job. We have a finale of the story in our mind, we know some crucial points in the game, and we lead the story towards them. Before we hired a second writer, we could barely keep up with the rest of the team in this area. Now things are definitely looking up, most of the text is now proofread a few times, which is where we fix most of the mistakes. Though, theres still plenty of them left. We love experimenting and I love playing with our players emotions, especially I like giving you events that make you experience some bad feelings, those kinds of feelings are stronger, they stay with you for a longer period of time. For this kind of thing to work its important for you to have some connection with the character on the screen, without that it simply wont work. When someone writes a review saying something like: You abducted Kagera, I hate you, this is like a balsam for my soul. Thats exactly why we did that event, didnt we!? :) Actually, wed like to create a more sinister atmosphere in the game but so far, no luck in this area. We lack the experience and knowledge. Maybe one day. Good luck to all of you. Stay safe at such trying times.