Progress Report 2021.09.08

Hi friends,

The public build launches tomorrow! 🥳 It’s been a long road to get to this point and, if I’m being honest, it feels a little surreal.

Alpha Build 1.0.9. has been patched three times since it released on September 1. This is mostly fixing minor bugs and unclosed HTML tags. I will be updating the alpha build with one more patch tomorrow before the public build goes live. After that patch, your Chapter 1 saves will be safe and stable—you shouldn’t have to restart the game from the beginning moving forwards.

Important Notes for the Alpha & Public Builds

The alpha and public builds of the game share the same internal name and IFID. This means that they share meta data, which will affect your saves. If you’re jumping between the alpha and public builds, your saves for both versions will be available at the same time and your autosaves will be overridden by whatever version of the game you have open in your browser.

As I continue to add to the alpha build, this means that if you used a save from the alpha build on the public build, you will eventually encounter error messages when the public build can’t find the passages that exist only on the alpha.

To avoid confusion, it is probably best to only play one version of the game or to use downloaded save files rather than browser-saves.

September Creator Q & A

This month, I am doing a new Creator Q&A! If you’d like to participate by submitting questions (they can be about anything—game-related, story, characters, coding, writing—whatever!), you can submit them to this post here or through the form here. I will answer them in a podcast-style Q&A and release it at the end of the month.

Next Steps for the Alpha Build

I need to take some time off (and work on the much-belated bonus content 😅), so I don’t anticipate any new updates for the alpha this month. I am hoping to start work on Chapter 2 sometime in September. Similar to Chapter 1, Chapter 2 will be updated in stages as I complete each major section.

Chapter 2 is much shorter and much more linear than Chapter 1, so it’s development pace is going to be very different than the previous chapter. Plus, I’m no longer fiddling with design choices and I know all of my coding tricks, so progress now will be centered on writing new content and adding it to the build.

Thank you all so much for your support! It means so much to have all of you here; I wouldn’t be able to make this game without you. 💕