Hello, fellow netrunners.

Considering the end of February has come and gone and there has NOT been a build release as was initially projected, I felt some kind of update was warranted.

tl;dr We’re trying to get the beta of Chapter 4 to patrons ASAP, probably early April, but that is contingent on all of our assets being delivered; we’re still waiting on several. Public release will come some weeks after that. Episode 3 of the podcast also has an updated release window of ASAP / in the next week or two.

The Usual Song And Dance

First, it’s worth mentioning that Chapter 4 is larger than both Chapters 3A and 3B combined, so the sheer number of assets required has exceeded the usual scope of our builds. As such, asset delivery is taking longer than estimated even after scaling back some of our initial plans. My usual philosophy on this is “late and good” is always better than “timely and meh” especially when we have so many plates spinning with different artists, which means juggling a lot of different schedules.

We’re also moving forward with some back-end quality of life updates, namely in UI adjustments and the way we handle sprite construction, so we’ll have a lot more flexibility and modularity in the way we present both of those things. What this means in plain terms is that our UI will allow us to convey more information, and our sprites will have a greater range of nuanced expressions.

Unfortunately, building the initial workflow for anything always takes some startup time, so what might have taken us 2-3 months of sprite design has ballooned to 4-6 months. But now that we’ve done it once, we can refine the process and speed things up as we look backwards to update our older sprites to this newer method.

If you’re curious about the details, I write a project management post every month that explains our roadmap and can be seen on our patreon for as little as $1.

Second, and in a similar vein, the scope of our podcast also expanded, so with the inclusion of more voice talent comes the need for greater production and refinement time. We’re always trying to hit a moving target when it comes to deadlines, since we’re still learning what all of our pain points are, and also have to deal with random issues like surprise nearby construction during recording hours for weeks at a time.

With greater investment in our project, we can reduce some of those issues by doing things like renting private studio time which we have to date been unable to afford. Thus is the usual conundrum with independent projects: “how can we manage with what we have.” This is a good example of how your investment and patronage can make an immediate, material difference in how we approach problems.

Enough Of That

In better news, keep an eye on our social media, as the Furry Visual Novel Showcase we participated in at Midwest FurFest will be appearing on YouTube soon. Further, we will be hosting a panel at Furry Weekend Atlanta to talk about the Cyberpunk genre, so keep an eye out for that as well.

Finally, we encourage everyone to check out Pawprint Press, with whom we have a partnership for merchandise. Right now, we’re only offering stickers, but we hope to expand our merchandise selection in time. Naturally, there’s lots of other great stuff to see there from our furry visual novel peers, so check it out.

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments, but otherwise, signing off for now.

Thank you for your support, everyone!

– Reo