Progress Report 23-05 (Public)
January has felt like a LONG month, but it was a productive one. The final version of Ep1 was released for beta testing on Thursday. Over the weekend I've been applying any fixes reported to me, but the list has been short so far.
I'm very excited to release it this week on Thursday! For anyone who has played the v0.36 version that's been available for awhile will notice huge changes. It's almost like a new game.
What to expect:
A whole lot of re-rendered images plus some new ones to improve quality.
A lot of added and adjusted dialog. I've had a certain vision for some characters and I took a lot of time to try to get their personalities right.
AUDIO! I've added a lot of sound effects and music throughout the game, and also tried to get the volume level at the right place for everything. (So no more blowing out eardrums with the intro song.)
An extra bonus scene.
My original plan for this series was about 20k words and 600 images per episode. Ep1 now sits at 30k words and 900 images... a full 50% larger than anticipated. Sure, it's taken extra time to get there but I think it helps tell the full story better.
Personal Notes:
It's very rare that I come up with a project that I love and am proud of. The amount of iterations this has gone through to reach this point is crazy when I think about it. I'm not a fan of redoing work, but in this case it had to be done. It was my first crack at a VN and I wasn't going to nail it the first try.
Everything that's made public is going to receive its share of criticism, and TaH was no different. Sometimes it's a struggle to hear the hate, but picking through opinions to find ways to improve the game was important.
At this point when I do my own playthroughs, I really enjoy them. It's weird to say that I laugh at my own jokes or that scenes will still make me feel something, but at the end of the day I sought out to create something I would enjoy... And that's what I did. All I can hope for is that others do, too.
A personal goal is that I really want to grow until I become a prominent creator in this category. I've had success in other IRL fields that I had no business being in, so I have full confidence in what I can achieve here. Work will continue with Ep2 this week and I'll be even more excited to get that out to all of you as soon as it's ready!
-ckr