Big Announcement & Lots of New Information!

Hey everyone!

As you may have noticed, there haven’t been any updates for about a month. During that time, however, I managed to get quite a lot done.

I’ve completely assembled this part of the episode, and now it looks pretty much the way it should. There may still be a few minor things left to fix, but I’ll take care of them soon.

The biggest thing is that I finally figured out how to properly implement the sandbox mode. You may be wondering why I spent so much time working on it and what exactly was so difficult about it, so I’ll try to explain the problems I ran into below.

First of all, the sandbox mode was always meant to be a platform that I could update several times more frequently than the main story, so players could constantly have new content to explore.

But this immediately created the first major problem: imagine that several episodes have already been released, and a player wants to focus exclusively on the main story and then return to the additional quests later. How do I synchronize all of that?

I needed a system where the player wouldn’t lose their progress in the main storyline, while still being able to complete quests that remain available after certain free-roam stages.

I spent a very long time working on a solution to this problem, and I believe I’ve finally managed to create the right system. I call it "floating saves" for now. You’ll see how it works in the future, but I’m completely satisfied with the result - and that’s what matters most.

Another problem immediately appeared: there are players who absolutely hate free-roam and want to play exclusively through the main storyline.

So I had to make sure that the sandbox would be purely optional, and that players who don’t want to interact with it wouldn’t miss anything essential from the main story.

I worked on that as well, and now the sandbox mode has absolutely no impact on the main storyline.

However, I think another question immediately comes to mind: what’s the point of having a sandbox mode if it doesn’t provide any bonuses?

The main point is that it will offer a lot of exclusive content - everything from exclusive encounters with girls to exclusive animations. You’ll also be able to earn some extra money, which will definitely come in handy throughout the main storyline.

Of course, you can complete the story without this extra money. You’ll just have to be a little more careful with your spending in certain situations.

But I also had to think about preventing players from simply staying in the sandbox forever and making millions of dollars, even though that obviously wouldn’t make sense within the story.

And finally, there was one more major problem: to fully implement the sandbox, I needed to give the player complete freedom of movement.

I had a lot of ideas for how to do this, but every solution either broke in some way or simply wasn’t intuitive enough.

Then, just a few days ago, I finally managed to create what I believe is the best implementation of free movement for the sandbox mode.

Now, regarding the release:

I decided to slightly extend the beginning of Episode 2. There will now be more content in the main storyline, but this also means development has taken a little longer.

However, I’m planning to start beta testing the first part of Episode 2 by the end of August.

Stay tuned for more news, and have a great week, everyone!

Oh, and yes - expect a couple of new previews very soon! :)