I'm aware I'm probably a little late in posting this, but better late than never, eh?
For those that don't/can't/won't follow outside of Steam, I generally post Play Sheets, which are generally just progress reports with current progress and what's in the pipeline. For the sake of not making you read an entire book, I'm just going to post the progress chart I update daily on my Patreon page (which is free to see, along with said Play Sheets.), along with some quick notes on a couple of the more vague parts (Note, if you can't see the full image, then Right Click > Open Image in New Tab should bring up the full image in another tab).
- We are currently at 627 renders (approximately 20-ish more after today, but not entirely done yet.). They currently aren't rendered yet, to be clear. They, however, are all posed, lit, and ready to be rendered in batches. Likely not overnight due to the heat and shitty air conditioning here.
- Currently, we have 4 short, SFW animations ready to go. These mostly act as pseudo-transitions to other scenes. There's currently one lewd scene prepped so far (though these will be actively done once all other rendering is done for the sake of time.). While there will be scenes to (largely) fill the lewd quota, the next couple of Episodes will be fairly story-heavy and lacking in consistent adult activity with most of the main LIs. This is due to MC-kun getting to know the LIs better. Most of them aren't just going to spread their legs for him.
- Move The Chains is currently going through a full, sweeping edit that's (thankfully) being made a lot, lost faster by volunteers reaching out to help with the typos/grammar. This leads directly into Steam, but more on that below!
- Music will be getting a facelift with Episode 3 as I'm finally able to afford some paid music. Hopefully with Steam, something like Universal Productions Music will become more plausible. This will coincide with the renormalization of the current music in Episode 1 along with the removal of Share Alike licensed (I plan to reach out to some of the artists with SA licenses to see if they're willing to work something out) songs as they kind of go against Steam's nature as a business. Move The Chains isn't Share Alike, nor will it ever be. Depending on the success of the release, MTC will be seeing a fair number of improvements. From translations into other languages, possible animators (to move things along while I'm rendering.), and potentially voice acting if the userbase is up for it. All of that hinges on support, though.
- As a side note, the UI's been updated a bit more than what's represented in the UI tour video on the main store page. I'll likely be reuploading that as soon as I fix the character menu!
A few weeks ago, I took the plunge into the process of uploading the Demo for Episode 1 of MTC. Despite a few quirks the process went fine. A week or two later, you might've noticed a small update (if you still had it on your system). This was a locale setting fix. I didn't know how broken locale was on older Windows systems. Linux was also having an issue. Thanks to LoafyLemon and shark_inna_hat (neither of which appear to be on Steam.), it got fixed rather quickly. But it was an issue present on the Steam demo.
Now, what you likely clicked on the title for ːsteammockingː. . .
So, continuing where I left on the editing point, we're doing a bit of a full edit as the game will start going out to curators quite soon. While the curators are (hopefully) looking at the game, we'll be raising wishlists to an absolute maximum (hopefully 10k+) and roll right into the October NextFest, which hopefully will drive up wishlists further. By which point, Episode 4 should be nearly done and ready to go on Steam in Early-ish November - if not earlier.
That all being said, if we hit our wishlist goal earlier than expected, we might make the forgo the NextFest and release early. But until then, we hope this clears up some of the silence (on Steam) about where the development of Move The Chains is at, and see you on the next Devlog!
P.S. Discord coming very soon! If any curators would like a curator key (and no, I'm not giving you scammers extra keys for you to sell. So don't try.), reach out to me at [email protected] or anywhere else you can find me! :)