This dev log was originally posted on Patreon and SubscribeStar on May 17, 2024.

Chapter 5 Development

Last week Josselyn and our coder, Cosmic Mirage, had a productive voice call going over plans for the Murder Mystery Game we'll be integrating into Chapter 5.

We have enough assets made (backgrounds, sprites, GUI) and enough dialogue written to start playing around with implementation. We also hope to get m. (who recently remade the GUI for both of our games) involved with some new GUI elements to give the Murder Mystery Game a unique feel, separate from the main story of the game.

We'll include some previews of how it's all coming together in future dev logs! To get a taste of what it will look like, you can check out our previous dev log for previews of the backgrounds and look for the outfit polls we'll be doing this month and next.

Other than that, Josselyn has been slowly chipping away at the writing and rendering, which is pretty typical for this phase of the development cycle. Currently, the written word count for Chapter 5 is around ~15K words and ~400 renders have been made (including the previously mentioned assets for the Murder Mystery Game).

Translated Builds

Another thing we hope to achieve during this development cycle is translated builds of A Shot in the Dark through Chapter 4, which we know many of our Steam players are eagerly awaiting. Once we have builds they will still have to be tested thoroughly before they are released, but we're getting very close to having builds ready to test!

Voice Acting

Lastly, we are excited to announce we are working with HaruLuna and other voice actresses to add more voice acting to the game (both to previous chapters and future ones)! We tried out voice acting for the first time with the Ashley scene in Chapter 4 (featuring Cinder) and we were super happy with the results, so we've decided to do more. We'll have more information about that as we get further into the process.

Chapter 5 Previews

Here are some previews from the first scene of Chapter 5 which is fully written and rendered. Just in case you were worried we weren't going to resolve the cliffhanger from Chapter 4, let this be proof that we won't leave you hanging. ;)