Good news, everyone! I am writing this Steam post with a computer and not dictating it over the jail phone!
To keep it succinct, after a year of getting gaslit by transphobic morons who convinced themselves that I, I quote, real words from my real file, "have failed to acquire a single competency aiming to attain sobriety", the parole board reviewed my case and instantly kicked my ass out of jail. Hurray! The system works! This experience has been strictly negative and pretty much convinced me that nobody in this country is serious about anything, but let us not linger on that. That was so last year, and it's time to play make the GAAAAAME.
Okay, what are we doing? Well, I dunno yet. I'm stuck in a halfway house which frankly is not that much of an obstacle since I remain allergic to touching grass :D. Still, I'm really not sure how to structure the next step because as I explained previously, Arachne got the hell out of there and is no longer part of the team. To be totally frank, she was not doing anything production critical, so it'll be fine, but I need to re-organize the dates and figure out how to cut the content she was responsible for so that I can turn this into a release that I can both QA and make at the same time. It's time to be a responsible adult and not spend months developing soldering mini-games so that you all actually get to see a 1.0 :)
I know what you're thinking - WHAT ABOUT KIM? Kim is working a day job to make sure that we can actually get to 1.0 without me becoming homeless. Kim is a good person. Please go tell Kim she is awesome and that I love her, she may be the only reason why you're getting another update to this stupid game. She still wants to make content and we're looking at that. If we get to that I will post about it. Stay tuned.
My initial impression of the next steps will be to complete the drafts of the missing story critical levels, re-release the demo club level with the new features (since it's actually up next in the storyline), do the final level and cap off a 1.0 for commercial reasons after which I would like to add the two planned side-missions that I am soft-cutting so that I'm giving myself a reasonable workload. The good news is sales are still going, perhaps not strong but going nevertheless, so there is a very good chance that 1.0 will produce enough income to justify doing things like finishing the netcode (there's been coop netcode in the build all this time, did you notice?) and making extra levels like the VR challenges. I don't want to promise anything at this stage, I'm still evaluating, but I am very certain that the next release will be 12 months from now. I'm aiming to have something by 6 months, ideally! That would be the best. Again, I've been out 72 hours; still getting adjusted here.
In the meantime, I will be continuing to draw the comic in my spare time since I'm officially allowed to have lead pencils (I'll try not to victimize any unsuspecting citizens with them, I promise) and I plan to release them with WIPs on Patreon as a little reward for backers since we've never had anything like that. Asides from that, I wrote a roguelike in C++ on paper while I was in jail. No, really. I may or may not release it. I don't want to dedicate serious time to it, I do not have the time for it, but I feel like you guys are going to want to play it, aren't you? The concept for the game is that you are a parasitic mushroom that can infest corpses and you can disemember defeated enemies and graft their pieces onto yourself as an equipment mechanic. It simulates the fluid density of eyeballs. I had a lot of spare time. Did I mention that it has a distance-field based sliced voxel openGL renderer that I also wrote on paper at 3 AM in a prison cell? It's been an interesting year.
One last thing! To anyone still saying I deserve to get beat up in jail for my horrible crimes, I'll be in cell 7. I haven't turned one down yet ːsteamboredː
See you, Space Convicts,
-DZ