Dev update (Patreon)

Hi All,

Firstly - Just some advice for any of you that join for the first time or have left and ant to re-subscribe.   - I advise against subscribing very late in the month because Patreon charges people at the start of every new month regardless of when you joined.  So if for example you join on the 29th of January, you will be charged as soon as you join (for January) but you'll also be charged on the 1st February (for February), so if it's close to end of month, I'd advise holding off until the new month (unless there's a specific item that you want immediate access to and don't want to wait until the next month start).

Now, if you are fully aware of Patreon's charging process and still want to subscribe at end of month, I won't complain :) but  I think it's only fair / right to remind people about it.

Secondly- Just wanted to drop a note to introduce you to the two newest additions to our team.  Cameo and Red will be joining as artists and are currently working away on Episode 17 and getting to know the crazy chaos that Ace and I currently operate in.

Really excited to have these on the team and I'm sure you'll be very happy with the quality of their work.

Also... while we're on that subject, it appears that quite a few people felt that we made too many changes to Lily (based on the teaser image I posted last week).  It was Ace / my idea to try a few new things with her (new hair, glasses for this specific scene and some make-up) but it looks like it was too much to change in one go and a lot of you voiced your concerns that she looked too different.  Let me stress that these differences were not because of the new artist, these were changes that we asked for.  

But we don't want to muddy the waters and change too much in the first month with a new artist (don't want the new artist getting blamed for giving us the changes WE requested), so we decided to back-track on some of these changes and Lily looks a lot more familiar in the latest images (I'll upload another teaser after this post)

I'm a little surprised at the reactions (women change their hair/make-up all the time) but it's also a good testament to how endeared some of you folks are to these characters, so we'll take it as a compliment.  So in this case, we've listened to our patrons, but I still want to try out some slight tweaks / hair-styles / make-up in future depending on the situation/character as I feel this reflects real-life.

But it is important that you let us know your feedback / thoughts because we do listen  /act upon it.  (for now :) )

The Dev Process:

Some of you have previously asked me about the dev process for WTHI, so just wanted to let you know how an episode comes to pass.

For each of the characters, we know what their arc is and already have a picture of what each characters next 2 or 3 planned scenes will be.  So when planning an episode, we determine which characters should appear (based on what makes sense, who we haven't seen in a while and the timing of the particular scene and also what part of the overall end-game story we want to reveal).  Ace and I come up with our wish-list of characters / scenes for the forthcoming episode and come up with a judgement of what we think we can/cannot make it into the next episode (based on estimated length, flow with previous and future episodes and scene complexity).

We then give an overview of the scenes to the artists to come up with some seed / concept images so we get a feel for how the scene will look, while Ace and I divvy up some scenes and start writing (in parallel to the artists creating their scenes).  There's obviously a bit of back and forth between us all to agree on adjustments and align on the scene, e.g. sometimes the requested outfit doesn't look right or the location needs to be changed, etc.  (or we backtrack on the characters look based on public outcry, ahem.... Lily)

And then as the writing for the scene progresses, we send on more requests for specific images to the artists until we build up most of the scene script / images together.

Then I usually add/edit further to each scene (my own and Ace's) and plug in the images in the right spots and ask for any further art additions/edits.

And then we repeat this for each scene.  And although this sounds relatively simple, it's never usually as streamlined as this.  Sometimes we're all working on the same scene at the same time and sometimes (usually) we are all working on completely different scenes.  And once we have a few scenes complete (or almost complete) we fit them all together to see how the overall game flows, etc. and then further discussions about what we think does / doesn't work.  And then further re-writes, re-renders or additions occur.  And this continues until all scenes are complete.

And once we're happy with the collection of scenes, we try to run it and get about 1000 errors in the code that we fix, then spot 1000 typos that we fix (an miss another 100 or so).  And keep going until we have something of sufficient length and quality that we're ready to release (or beta).

Episode 17 is still a mixed bag when it comes to development good news / bad news but rest assured that work on it is incessant and please bear with us as we gel as a new foursome....