Hello to all B.E.S.T participants! Today a little update on where we are and where we are going!
So this week was not very productive in terms of work on the game itself but much more on meetings with lawyers, accountants, banks... The success of B.E.S.T forced us to review our company plans (basically we just wanted to remain self-employed...) and to open a development company in France... Lots of paperwork, all to better manage taxes and it's not over yet... We're still waiting the official papers to be able to open the professional bank account etc... In short... The good news from all this is that we will be able to start working peacefully by having the funds for the small family... or even hire to support the project / start other projects!
Besides that, we read all your comments and reviews of the game and we sincerely want to thank you for your opinions, whether positive or negative, because they are very important to us and above all, you give us your opinion on what you would like to find in the game, the improvements that we can make and all the optimizations that we can add! Its really great to have your feedback and I thank you once again! So, you gave us your opinion for the end of episode 2: We are going to release an EPISODE 2 EXTENDED update with what we had planned for the start of episode 3! This update will add about 20 minutes of additional content, a little lewd, a little romance and a little more action before the planned integration day for episode 3 :) We will try to release it next month, while we finish the 2 big scenes of this update and do the translations.
In terms of improvements that would be interesting and feasible for episode 3, there are points on which we tend to agree with you: - Add an interactive map to the game for the player's movements so that he goes to the stadium / gymnasium / class etc... and has several possible choices on the map depending on the moment in the story... Rather than to go through buttons, this would make the game more lively and dynamic and would give the player more of an impression of "playing". We will try to create this map for episode 3. - We had overestimated the principle that players replay the game several times to see all the possible paths. Indeed, it seems that the players quickly chose their favorite and do not play another game once they have reached the end, because they are waiting for the rest of the story with her... (Grace would have a good proportion of players on this subject it seems :) ).
We are therefore going to try not to do too many parallel paths as we did from episode 1 with Red and Blue but rather to keep paths by girls by having the maximum scene length and not in parallel. I don't know if you understand what I'm writing to you but basically the choices will have an impact on the content of the scene but more on the appearance of the scene itself. - The phone is something we have already implemented in the game but we are only using the chat function for now. We will try to use the phone better but we will do it from episode 4 for "logical" reasons from that point on in the storyline. The goal is also not to take too long to integrate new things and not to make progress on game updates... - In terms of the events, we are going to try to implement some gameplay elements in the next ones, nothing too crazy so as not to put the players in difficulty either, but just enough to make them "participate" during an event sport by tapping the space bar to increase the shooting gauge on the next match for example... Let the player be active in the game and no longer just directed by the story.
- Finally we are going to try to set up a tree of choices within the game for Episode 4, so that you can see what paths you have unlocked and what you might have missed! We say Episode 4 because it's a big feature and at the moment we have no idea how to implement it but it will give us time to research while we do Episode 3 calmly. These are the points on which we will try to improve... If you see other important things, do not hesitate to tell us via the comments or the forums! Once again we will integrate new things gradually but this must not be at the expense of the progress of the overall story... We want to succeed in offering you between 2 and 3 complete episodes per year and let's not put additional delays on features that wouldn't add much to the game. Well, there you have it, I wrote a big piece today! For those who are still here reading me... Thank you! And I'll see you in 2 weeks for the next Devlog which will be dedicated to this EXTENDED UPDATE! Waiting for... Happy Valentines Day everyone! Dolyla