We are now doing weekly dev logs, but alternating between our two games. This week, it's all about A Shot in the Dark, and next week we'll give an update on Prince of Suburbia.

Chapter 4 Development

The past two weeks Josselyn has been mainly focused on renders, for a particularly large scene. Right now the scene is about 75% complete with 256 renders done. The game currently has 845 renders completed! TheOmega also finished the Alexis animations and will work on the Paloma animations next. Basically, we're right in the middle of the "content creation" stage of the development phase where there's not a ton to say except we're grinding away as usual!

Here are some previews from the Mai scene for Chapter 4:

Steam Release

The December Steam release of A Shot in the Dark is sneaking up on us quickly! The work we do to prep for Steam doesn't get reflected in the progress update percentages, but trust us when we say many, many hours of work have gone into it so far and we still have a lot left to do! Selling our games on Steam is essential to the financial sustainability of our studio, so while it's not the "fun part" it is an important part and something that we take very seriously.

As we've mentioned before, we have someone working on optimizing the code so that we can localize and translate the game efficiently. The first phase of that project is wrapping up, and soon we'll be able to begin the second phase where the game is actually translated. Our hope is to have the game available in multiple languages by the time we release in December, or shortly after.

Because we are already breaking saves due to the code optimization and song replacements, we decided this was also a good time to upgrade from Ren'Py 7.4.11 to Ren'Py 8+. When we'd tried to do it before, it broke the texting feature and created other small bugs, and we didn't have the manpower to deal with it. Now we do, so we're going for it! Upgrading will improve performance for players, and also be easier for our own coders to work with.

We are also excited to be participating in Steam Next Fest which takes place October 9-16, 2023. We have been sprucing up Chapter 1 which is the free demo for the game in preparation for the game and demo being featured heavily on Steam during that timeframe.

It's hard to believe, but most of the renders for Chapter 1 were created around 2 years ago! Josselyn has been gradually going back and "sprucing up" the renders from  Chapter 1 so that the demo better reflects the overall visual quality of the game. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and especially on Steam it's important we put our best foot forward!

None of renders from Chapter 1 are being entirely redone, but most of them have hugely benefitted from a little tweaking, mostly of the lighting and camera angles. Here are some examples:

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