Chasing Sunsets - Of Livestreams, Patches, and Polls
As the holidays approach, and Chapter 6 is firmly in our rearview mirror, I thought I'd take a moment to make a few announcements.
New Binary/Patch Download Approach
The first is that we'll be changing our download links to folders, so you can choose the Mac or PC version at your discretion. We'll also keep the latest patch file in there in case you don't want to do a full download again.
The folder link WILL update whenever there's a new chapter released, but this should minimize the confusion over where to download files and what the latest version is with the current chapter going forward.
These links should now be live and can be found stickied at the top of the patron page.
Chasing Sunsets 0.7a (Bugfix) Released
This leads me to my second announcement: In those folders you will find Chasing Sunsets v0.7a. You can either download the full binary at the new links, or download the 0.7a "scripts.rpa" file in the subfolder. This can be copied to "ChasingSunsets/game/" and with an overwrite, should update your current install to 0.7a with no difficulty.
This is not a critical update, as none of the bugs were really game-breaking, but this does resolve a number of spelling/grammatical issues, and also tones down the Chapter Summary statements if you chose certain paths after becoming more serious with Mallory. The full patch notes will be available in the folder with the patch itself.
Chasing Sunsets is Gaining Weight
The third announcement may be a bit more controversial: After flowcharting what needs to happen in Chapter 7, I do not believe we can comfortably fit it all in one chapter. After speaking with Kentyrr, I believe the best option will be to increase the planned chapter count to complete the game to Prologue + 10 chapters.
I know this may be frustrating for people who saw the story coming to a quicker conclusion, but we feel we would not be able to do the story justice if we tried to cram everything that needs to happen next into a single update. Alternatively, we could have just made a super-sized chapter, but we feel that regular content updates keep our story relevant. We're sorry if anyone feels let down by this scope creep.
Post-Release Developer Livestream in December
Next, I'd like to announce that we'll likely host our post-release Livestream on Dec 10th. As we get closer to stream date, we'll finalize the date and time, with no small deference to our host's availability. Please don't hesitate to begin posting questions for the Livestream in the #questions-for-dev-streams channel in Discord.
All are welcome, and Kentyrr and I love every chance we get to interact with fans of the story. We hope to see you there!
Chapter 7 Announced!
Lastly, I would like to announce the kick-off of Dev Cycle 8, as we begin working on Chapter 7, titled "Convergence."
It's time for the Campbells to start wrapping things up on Tonalu and begin to looking at returning home. As the chapter title implies, a lot of moving parts are starting to build toward a climax, and some of them will determine the shape of things to come.
Accelerated endings will become more common in the remaining chapters as the story moves into the third act. The echoes of choices made far in the past may return to help - or haunt - our protagonists.
While this has already been a long update, I wanted to wrap up with a poll.
A Quick Poll
Discord integration was one of those things we implemented that seemed better on paper than it ended up being in practice. One of the things we did not consider as carefully as we should have is that adult gaming isn't something many people want to advertise to their other friends on Discord.
While we made the feature toggleable in the settings menu, I am considering ripping it out entirely, unless the player base finds it useful.
For those who don't dig into the settings much, all Discord integration does is show under the player's name in Discord that they are playing Chasing Sunsets, and approximately what part of the game they are on.