Warm greetings to everybody, and happy holidays!

This year has certainly been a crazy one so far. Last year around this time we also wrote a retrospective post, laying out what we had done and reflecting a bit about the challenges we had faced.

All good things come in pairs, so here we go for another one! Aside from the obvious and unique situation with the worldwide pandemic, we each faced our own new challenges this year. Be it with changes in jobs, schooling, our private lives, or our team composition.

Blue Bishop, one of our former writers, left our team earlier this year and we saw two new arrivals in his place: Vinickus and Wattson. Vinickus joined as a new writer while Wattson recently joined to help Rriik out with programming, but also as a generalist helping us with the lesser developed areas of the project.

Story & Writing

We didn't really see much new content being added, even though the shift in writers happened back in May. On top of personal setbacks, we had to lay out a comprehensive plan for the rest of the game's story and themes in the background and to fix the underlying dating framework and structure we would be writing with.

Vinickus has since revamped the story of the first day with almost 300 changes and additions, which will be shipped with the next update. Certain details have been added to go better with the encounters and storyline that will be explored later. You will see a light change in the writing style itself, given we are cutting down on the inner monologues quite a bit.

For Lone_Wanderer this last year marked a pretty big change in his life for the better. While not that much writing from him made it into the game this year, he has written the first Cedrik content and several other smaller scenes. Lately he has been more focused on fixing and changing the writing along with Vinickus, and will soon start writing day six together with Vinickus to move the plot forward to a new chapter.

To top it off, we have worked on fleshing out underdeveloped characters such as Cedrik, Stralf (the kobold bellhop guy) and Camila. We aren't quite finished yet with these characters, however we may talk about them in a separate post later.

Programming

So, overall this year has been a year of changes and fixes for us. Similarly, with the programming side of our game, it marked the transition to a new game engine and with it, the possibility of creating something truly unique.

At the moment, our Godot framework runs Identity just like it would in Ren'Py, if not better and with huge visual improvements, which is a milestone years in the making. The new engine is already proven to be way more advantageous and easy to use for us, and with Wattson joining to help Rriik, the hope is that eventually we will vastly improve upon it and even open source this framework to the public in the future. To our knowledge, it is currently the most comprehensive visual novel framework available for Godot.

Artwork

Throughout this year we introduced a fully custom UI for our game, we managed to cover over 95% of the existing game content with background art, we added generic sprites for every relevant character in the game, and we are now experimenting with introducing side images, beginning with Yarin. We are also adding another illustration by Lumix (for a bad ending you can get with Mindalu during day 4) and have two other pieces already commissioned.

Moreover, since Wattson's joining about a month ago, we have compiled a master list of almost 3000 notes spread throughout the whole game content, marking each character's expressions and emotions on each line of dialogue in an attempt to organize our plans for sprites and side images.

(snapshot of the sprite notes spreadsheet showing some of Yarin's expressions)

We also have plans to create a better system for displaying artwork that is layer-based. This will greatly reduce the file size of the game while allowing us to more easily display a greater range of character looks and expressions.

Music

For the first time, the game is about to get a huge boost in music content. We added full audio coverage for the first 3 days of game content, finally adding the tracks made by Samples (our musician) for the past year and a half. We have also been continuously refining these tracks as Samples got himself better audio gear and software.

Not only that, but we are also working hard to implement a music gallery by next update that will allow you to hear all these tracks independently.

Wrapping Up

All this talk about the next version might make you wonder when it will come out. The answer is in about a week! We want to have it out before the end of the year and we have been making great progress on that deadline, so it won't be long before you can experience all these changes.

Until then, we humbly want to thank each and every one of you who has kept supporting us even amidst this pandemic and even despite our less frequent progress updates. Your support was and is invaluable to us, and your believing in the project is what inspires us to push through these trying times.

As a bonus, we leave you with a gorgeous art piece by our artist Weisser Rauch, featuring Kovle being his usual self, working late into the night in his suite even during the holiday season.