Project Plan January

Potentially the last project plan post before the 1.0 release?! I will just quickly preface this that we are currently looking good in finishing the content work for 1.0, but we still have quite a bunch of bugs from the most recent content, so it might be that I decide that instead of 1.0 release at the end of the month, I will decide to call the version 1.0-beta. For patreon and itch players, I don't think this makes too much of a real difference, but for steam that would mean that I would delay the release by some weeks until we are stable enough.

Or maybe we will just release on schedule?! Or there is the possibility that I will actually release a 1.0-beta version one week ahead of the current planned monthly release date since various algorithms such as itch.io require a 1 month time between updates (the December one didn't quite have a 1 month distance to the November release so we didn't get that push) to maybe get an extra bit of visibility before the main release?!

One thing is sure: We are in the last stretch for the 1.0 release where things are difficult to predict because of the small time windows. Here is the plan for the month:

Week 1: I managed to finish the Final Battle just in time, but I had to much myself quite hard to get there. So, even though this is the release month, since this is also a 5-week update, I need to make use of that first week to recharge my batteries a bit. I will be working on plenty of things. Mostly bugfixes (expect another hotfix before the weekend is over) and concept work to create some flowcharts and bullet points for the upcoming Good Ending epilogue scenes. Other than, I will mostly work on a more relaxed pace and on New Year's / Day of New Year's probably completely take those two days off to recharge.

Week 2: And then it's time to jump into the last batch of main content: The Good Ending Epilogue! I have not yet done the concept work I mentioned in Week 1, so while I have quite some ideas of what I want to do, I still need to select which ones I want to go with and turn them into proper concepts for scenes I can implement.

Week 3: And then Week 3 is basically a continuation.

Week 4: I plan to wrap-up the epilogue work in this week. And then just focus the rest of the week on some cleanup work (e.g. there are still some Artifacts that need to be implemented for the Artifact Workshop) and otherwise just minor polish stuff.

Week 5: Finally, the last week will just be a beta week. Hopefully all content should be done at this point, so I will be mostly just fixing bugs, doing some more playtesting myself and otherwise just generally continue applying minor cleanup and polish things.

Originally, I wanted Week 3+ to be Beta weeks and not just Week 5, but there are too many low-hanging fruits I believe to add variations to the epilogue scenes, plus there are other little items such as some remaining artifacts I need to implement, so Week 4 definitely is too value for wrapping up the content to already switch over into a beta state. And starting the Epilogue Week 1 after the sprint that was 0.50.0 is definitely not mentally possible for me. :'D

Ah, and apropo beta: I will sometime in the upcoming week probably start a Steam Playtest (closed beta) where it will be possible to register and playtest the Steam version in particular to check that all the achievements that will be implemented work.

Then, for our freelancers.

RPGM Developer.

Our Assistant Developer Trihan will be mostly working on achievements. We haven't otherwise yet discussed his other tasks for January, but we have some outstanding items that we had originally scheduled for December and then there are probably quite some improvements to perform on Clockwork Forest.

2D Artist.

Our 2D Artist is on the last CG. And then we will start 2.0 CG production, for which there will be a poll soonishly.

Other freelancers are now mostly done. Our mapping work is largely complete - maybe I might need an extra map or two for some new locations in the epilogue scenes - but generally speaking those would be minor maps I can make myself. Likewise, pixelart is also done for 1.0. Which I am glad about because the prices for these had been increased quite a bit, while our freelancer at the same time became less reliable. I definitely want to keep looking for other people to fill these roles in the future.

Finally, I get a lot of questions regarding the future plans after the release of 1.0. I will be posting a new long-term roadmap on the 2.0 development sometime mid-January, where I will talk about the general development plan. I will just take away that after 1.0 is done, I will mostly likely work 50% on the 2.0 version of Star Knightess Aura and 50% on a new project that will most likely be smaller in scope. More regarding that in said roadmap post.