ViM Studios: Dev Log 22-Nov-2022

We're doing our dev log early this week so that we can all take a few days off for the Thanksgiving holiday, rest, and spend time with family. Except our poor PCs -- they don't get a break, they will continue rendering away!

In the spirit of the season, we'd like to extend a GIANT THANK YOU to our AMAZING team!

• auxiliaryout - the talented artist and animator who always brings his A-game to Prince of Suburbia
• Doc62 - programmer and tester extraordinaire, who really saved our butts this month
• BananasFoster - our most enthusiastic hype man, helping with all aspects of promotion
• Kitty Kaplan, Mute Hazelnut, and Renee Ryan - our endlessly imaginative writers who write the hottest sex scenes
• HaruLuna - whose voice acting elevates every scene she touches
• JV, Saniya, and shotz - our helpful Discords mods who do so much more than mod
• Hondo - for the hours he put into making an incredibly detailed walkthrough guide for A Shot in the Dark
• Metalmaniac, NeverAtone, and all our other team members who play test our games so thoroughly

We couldn't do this without you! THANK YOU for all that you do for ViM Studios!

Unfortunately, we are both still dealing with illness, whether the same as before or a new nasty bug. It's slowed us down a bit but, as you can see, we are still making progress!

A Shot in the Dark

Writing and renders for the second half of Chapter 2 (V0.2) of A Shot in the Dark are now complete. All scenes, text conversations, and Photogram content are implemented into the code. We are now implementing all of the other features that come along with an update and doing the final polish necessary before we can make a testable build.

It's looking like we will have to start play testing V0.2 without all of the animations fully rendered, but that shouldn't affect the actual testing. We are aiming to start testing soon after the holiday, and as soon as we know the build is good to go we will announce a release schedule!

Although V0.2 took slightly longer than we estimated, we're happy with where we're at for a few reasons. 

First, we did a better job of estimating how long this release would take than the last one. Second, this update is significantly larger than our prior two, but was still the fastest to complete so far. Lastly, we learned a lot from this update that will help us improve going forward.

As a quick comparison:

• V0.1 took about 9 months to develop. It contained ~36,000 words, 1,073 renders and 28 animations. (And of course almost the entire foundation of the game!)
• V0.15 took 4 months to develop. It contained ~22,000 words, 796 renders, and 27 animations. (It also included the new texting feature!)
• V0.2 will likely take 3.5 months to develop. It currently contains ~45,000 words and 1,297 renders, with over 100 animations planned! (No significant new features.)

Prince of Suburbia

As far as V0.9 of Prince of Suburbia, auxiliaryout is still hard at work remastering backgrounds and earlier scenes to be included with the V0.9 update. 

We're also starting to plan some of the fun scenes we have had in mind for a while for V0.95! V0.95 will include the most complex animations to date in Prince of Suburbia, so we want to go into that update with a lot of preparation.

Coming up for ViM Studios

As a heads up, December will be another busy month for our studio! 

In addition to the V0.2 release for A Shot in the Dark on Patreon/SubscribeStar and Itch likely happening in early December, we plan to release a free demo of A Shot in the Dark on Steam. 

We will also be releasing the long-awaited Prince of Suburbia - Part 2 (paid DLC) on Steam, which gives our Steam players access to the same version available on Patreon/SubscribeStar and Itch.

We hope you have a healthy, happy holiday weekend! Or, for our non-US fans, just a healthy, happy regular weekend! :)

ps. Apparently, our previews this time are so spicy that Patreon considers them to be unsafe for the public's eyes, despite not having any actual nudity. ;) So, look for them in a Patrons-only post after this one!