Hazelnut Latte v0.15 Alpha 1 Progress Report 2/3/26

Howdy everyone, and welcome to this week's Progress Report!

Some numbers moved, so let's talk about it!

The in-game options menu is working! We have a working History with UI art completed; our save/load is also working with art! We are in the process of designing the settings menu, but it is working. Our next step is to complete the dialogue UI and one other menu, which is secret. This should be done in the next week, fingers crossed.

As for art, all Special Moments are done! There was one moment we actually redid like 3 times, but now I think it's perfect. Then the last two moments were completed by Pamika, which looked out of this world. Oddly enough, it's the first thing you see in the build, and it's the last one we did.

As for animating the special moments, it is going well! The thing about this is, it is probably the only thing that does not need to be done before we launch the Alpha. If we're missing a few, that's fine with us; they'll be done for Alpha 2.

Music has progressed a bit! Two more demo tracks have been sent to me that sound excellent! We expect to have the finished tracks ready by the time the Alpha launches; if not, the Alpha may still use the old licensed music we had in Ren'Py.

What is v0.15?

I saw some confusion about this on the Discord, so why not a refresher?

We have left our old game engine, Ren'Py, in favour of a more versatile game engine, Unity. This build is our first one in Unity. Because we are in this new engine, we had to rebuild everything. Menus, user interface, sprites, scenes, etc. Since it was such a massive redo, I decided to essentially restart the story.

v0.15 will be the new, vastly improved Episode 1, 3 times as long as the old Episode 1. Some things will change, some will stay the same. You will be starting over, but I believe this take 2 will be worth it. The character arcs will be much stronger, and the story will be more solid. This is not a simple port from Ren'Py to Unity where all assets are identical. It will be very different.

Update When?

Honestly? Soon. We are very close to completing all implementation for the first Alpha. Once that is done, we will start testing and bug fixing. Once that is done, Alpha 1 will come out! Things really are falling into place. I never like giving dates, but we are feeling very confident. Stay tuned.

What is Alpha 1?

Alpha 1 is the first Alpha of v0.15, which will contain half of the episode. It will stay in Alpha while we work on the second half of the episode, which will be Alpha 2. Once Alpha 2 is complete, the episode will move to lower tiers. Unless, ya know, everyone hates that idea, but it makes sense to us. Lower tiers will get the build.

(edited)

Public Build When?

I announced back in September 2024 (wow, really?) that we would not be doing public builds anymore, but that is actually changing! After v0.15 is out and we start work on v0.16, v0.15 will replace v0.11.7 as the public build.

This is because the game is changing so rapidly that the current demo will no longer accurately reflect it. Will it be less """content"""? Sure, but it's also a 22k-word free demo that is longer than some of our competitors' full released $15 games.

TL;DR

The game is progressing nicely, and we are nearing the release of Alpha 1.

Wrap Up

Thank you all so much for your support! It takes a lot to make this game and keep it afloat. We obviously want to do it right, but we're trying not to take forever. Your support lets us pay rent and keep this dream of making a video game alive. We thank you. As always, be kind to one another in these dark times, and Stay Rad!