Firebreak Dev Update - Home Stretch

Just a quick update because I know we've been quiet as we put the finishing touches on Chapter 1.

We're very close to a release candidate as of this posting.

In the interest of transparency, a few items materialized after the last beta that have been a bit of a challenge to fix on the back end. My take was that all future chapters of Firebreak will build upon our launch framework, and design flaws introduced at the beginning are often very difficult to mitigate later in the development chain.

That said, there's also the concept of allowing "Perfect" to become the enemy of "Good," and as such the framework development is frozen for release at this point with remaining effort tied to minutae like functional unlockables, etc.

There was also a mechanism in the first chapter that lacked adequate explanation in the script as-written, so we've added a small scene to fill in those blanks.

The item that sent me back to the drawing board is one of the problems that plagued Chasing Sunsets from the beginning: Multiple sources of truth for the same variable.

While it sounds simple to merge all variables into a single source of truth, given that a number of character stats are persistent, the coding becomes somewhat more complex. Much of the last two weeks has been spent finalizing that migration and ensuring data does not become contaminated or concatenated between playthroughs.

Further, there were a few AI animations in our initial beta. Kent and I looked at the pros and cons of AI animation, and ultimately opted not to use it. Kent took some time to remake those animations in DAZ.

So, where does that leave us?

Story: Complete

Art (3000 images): Complete

Framework: Complete

Sound Design: Complete

What's not quite done yet?

Just a few polish items, really, and verifying unlockables and stat matrices. As it sits, just the first chapter has over 30 choices and provides an introduction to each potential love interest.

I had hoped to have all of this finished last weekend, but I'm 95% confident I can wrap it up this weekend. If that's successful, we'll give our testing crew a few days with the release candidate and then make the links available on this platform for supporters.

Sorry for the release slip, but we truly are looking at days rather than weeks now!

With that said, please DM us if you'd prefer your patron name is not listed in the credits. We already obfuscate for "real sounding" names, so if your patron username is "Joaquin Sigurdsson," we generally reduce that to "J.Sigurdsson" to provide plausible deniability, if that's important to you.

There'll be another post soon with the impending release announcement, so stay tuned!