Okay!  Let's get this trainwreck rolling!

I hope everyone is doing as well as they can throughout all this madness, both here and abroad.  I trust you all are keeping yourselves safe!

New build is mostly bugfixes and proofreading and we'll get into why that is in a minute.

If there are any softlocks left in the build please let me know so I can remove them ASAP.

I'm going to be frank for a minute.  My dev time has usually looked something like this:

-33% designing the  various "sets" for the game/"filming" them

-33% cobbling together art assets and/or designing them as best I can

-33% getting my scripts to behave

-1% eating my feelings when I can't get a script to behave

I'm not going to lie; the pandemic has seriously affected me financially.  I'm a middle manager at a restaurant and I spend most of my time there; what free time I had was split between my relationship and my projects.  While I didn't lose my job, I did lose a girlfriend and the pleasure of splitting my rent. I fell behind on my car payments and now I'm commuting two hours to work via public transit.  Please don't think that's a complaint, I'm pretty used to it and the walking is good exercise, so I'm cool with that. However. I'm in a strange place where I need to work more (been looking for a part-time on the side) while simultaneously needing to spend more time with myself so I can continue to be creatively expressive.  Lately I have received some donations and I am still totally blown away.  I can't really express how good that was for me, and at *such* a crucial time.  I mean that in a mental sense; I was pretty down.  Financially though, after accounting for taxes I actually have enough to pay my phone bill this month, which makes me pretty damn happy.  Words can't express what that means to me, but I can express what it means for you.

To say that this has lit a fire under my ass is a gross reduction of the reality of it.  I spent a good portion of the time between last update and now fleshing out the full story arc for all three episodes.  I've also spent a LARGE majority designing the exterior "set" outside the apartment, which is where you will spend the bulk of your time in this episode.  As such I am forced to make extremely deliberate design choices regarding the environment and it's surroundings, trying to get as much visual storytelling as I can in without being obnoxious.  Included are some screenshots of the current state of set, as well as the overall view of the set as it stands.  It is till very much in progress, as is designing the remaining floors of the apartment, the lobby, and the various characters/interactions therein.  I have spent some time streamlining the various processes I've been using, the end result being that finishing the apartment will only take a fraction of the time that the streets are taking. 

I can't promise which but one of the coming updates is going to be huge, increasing playtime by quite a bit.  That being said, the following hurdles remain and could potentially take me some time to get over:

- Finishing assets for the various factions and civilians you will encounter on the streets.  These include the ones mentioned in the game currently as well as a few others.

-Finishing all of GOLIATH's dialogue.  It's a process. Not a very efficient one, at that.  Considering that you will be able to interact with this thing all throughout the episodes (spoilers, I guess?) it's gonna be a lot of dialogue for that bad boy.  Did I bite off more than I could chew on that one? Only a little, but I'm committed to it and that's that.

-Writing some new music for the exterior (the original release build I put out featured music that I made but upon further playtesting I found a certain string section to be rather obnoxious after hearing it for the 50th time as the music loops, so I replaced it with some nice spooky placeholder ambience in the meantime.  

-Putting together a trailer and slapping it on my YouTube channel.  I'm hesitant to do it at this point as I will more than likely just specifically design certain assets specifically for the trailer (i.e. panning shots of buildings and such) as well as mix it with what I already have built.  Not necessarily super-difficult, but a bit fiddly.  Especially editing the footage without the software freezing/corrupting the footage/some other catastrophe.  Expect this process to start sometime within the next few months.

The good news is that all these are more or less coming together at the same time as the game grows and none of these should halt development in any way.

I'm being open here because I want you all to be aware of where we all stand.  I believe in full transparency and being honest about my work.  I also promise that from now on, unless it's a major update, the devlog will never be this long again.  If you're down here, thank you for reading.  I appreciate your time and I will do my best to reward it.

Warmest regards,

-Axelord1942