Status update + weekly report 14

Hi everybody.

We hope you've had a great week and are ready to wind down for the weekend. It's been a busy week at MagicNuts, and we do have a piece of news about 0.3 content.

0.3 Changes

For Holly's story, we tried to make two significant changes to the quest-design to experiment and see if we could come up with a better and different play experience:

• Reduce fetch-tasks
• Remove the 'think' quest

In the case of the fetch-quests, I think we succeeded. But removing the 'think' quest proved to be more challenging as it messed up the flow of the gameplay.

We had hoped that after posing and editing, the play would improve. But, to our horror, that was not the case. The gameplay was okay, but not great. So, in the past few days, we have been remaking and redoing the quests, adding additional events, with several series of cutscenes planned to make Holly's story more engaging.

The upshot of this is that we will not have time to do Myrtle's intro in 0.3. We're pushing her content for 0.4.

We hate having to do this. But after thinking about it and having never-ending discussions about it, it is the best decision we can make to both meet the deadline and keep the quality. 

It would be a shame for Myrtle's quest to feel rushed. On the other hand, we had removed things from Holly's story to make room for Myrtle's. We are going to add those back and try to tell as good a story as we can.

This change will not impact the playtime, and we will, as promised, have about 30-40 mins of content.

The progress tracker will be updated (by the end of this weekend) to reflect the removal of some content and the addition of others.  

Dev lessons

It is hard to estimate the time needed to do a story since each story is different. From 0.4 onward, we don't want to overpromise. It's better not to promise much and add extra content when time permits than do what we must do now.

We still want to experiment with different gameplay mechanics and try to improve the play experience. So, although it didn't work too well this time around, it would be cowardly not to try again and try to do things better.

Keeping it fair

We know that some of you might have subscribed/supported us because you expected Myrtle's content in 0.3. Removing her quest from this release is not fair on you. Hence we'll be more than happy to refund your fees if you contact us and let us know. 

Weekly tasks

Chestnut has been drawing sprites and adding facial expressions and body gestures to them. She has also started doing cutscenes.

I did a lot of posing, until realizing that I need to redo many parts of Holly's story (code + writing). I've now done changes to the content already in the game (we'll add more writing later).

Next week, Chestnut will work on cutscenes only (unless if we see that we need additional facial expressions as posing), and I will continue to pose the scenes.

Stay safe.
Cheers