Progress Report 2022.10.31: Ready When It’s Ready

Hi friends,

I hope you all had a wonderful month. While I have done a significant amount of work this month, Wayfarer’s progress isn’t close to where I projected it to be. Looking back at August, September and October combined, I am writing significantly slower compared to the first six months of the year, and it’s making it difficult to estimate deadlines properly.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Release Schedule poll. Because of the results, I am going to stick to my plan and update the alpha when all the variations are done and playable. Unfortunately, I’m not able to give an estimate as to when the alpha update will be ready. I am writing every day, but at this point the most I can say is that Episode 3 Scene 1 will be ready when it is ready.

Game Updates

I am pushing to get Episode 3 Scene 1 finished. I’m nearing the end of Aeran’s content branches. Much of the content I am writing now include conversations that will be recycled on other branches (with continuity edits). Since my last progress report, I’ve added about 25,000 words to the section, bringing Episode 3's new total to ~157,000 words.  

I will be doing a patch soon to address a major error that affects high friendship/no romance Aeran playthroughs. There’s a bug in the code that if you selected a specific dialogue option with Nova on the boat in Episode 2, it nets you +1 to romance even if you don’t have his romance stat flagged. This unintentionally puts your playthrough onto the low romance variant, even though Aeran's romance bar is blocked off in his profile and you can’t see what’s going on.

Patreon Updates

There have been a few major changes with Patreon and Discord. Wayfarer Patreon now has its own server separate from the public server. The Patreon-exclusive channels in the public server are currently read-only and will be available until November 15. If you’d like to grab screenshots of any lore discussions, now is the time to archive it!

If you’d like to join the patron server, you can do so automatically by enabling Discord in your Patreon settings. This post explains how to do that and also has more details about the server split.

Finally, for those in the Wayfarer tier and above, I’ll be taking a break from writing short stories for the month of November. Because I would like to get Episode 3 Scene 1 done as soon as possible, I need to take a step back from additional content to complete game content. New short stories should be back in December!

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. As always, thank you all so much for your support. 💕

P.S. Happy Halloween! 🎃