Hello everyone! We're back to our regularly scheduled mid-month updates!

Beta Release Successful!

We released Beta 0.1 at the beginning of July and everything went pretty smoothly! We managed to catch and patch a lockup bug the night before release, and testers only found one more minor lockup bug (and no crash bugs) after release.

Our biggest issue as always is missing dialogue tags that cause a character's dialogue to look like it's narration instead. This happens due to the way I paste the script into Visual Basic, so when I write Will's script I'm looking at making some changes that will minimize these errors. Thanks so much to the testers who reported in on the errors they found!

What's On Deck

I have two more scenes to write for Robin Chapter 3, and it should be about 50k words at that point, so my prediction that the routes will be at least 60k words appears to be accurate. Since it looks like many people are waiting for the full route to be available before joining beta, I will wait and release Robin Chapters 3-4 together so the entire route will be playable in beta for our next release.

Speaking of decks, I've been testing the game on the Steam Deck, and it's playable, but the UI needs some improvements for gamepad control. I'm working with Shawna on these improvements, which should also be helpful for general useability and increased accessibility. We shouldn't have any trouble being Steam Deck certified by our Early Access launch!

Meanwhile, Arrapso is busy completing the secondary character sprites needed in Robin's route and Lawrichai is working on Robin cut-ins. Shawna is programming in the Extras menu as well as working on the gamepad issues. I'm commissioning a new trailer that will feature our final character sprites and will serve as the intro video to the game, so it'll have less narration/marketing language in it.

See you next month!