Shifting Red

Hello all. It's certainly been a hot space-minute since we've updated this devblog, that's plain to see. But the gears are still turning here at Fam HQ, even if it's just one piece of a great big puzzle at a time. The core team is still meeting every weekend to touch base and do what we can, when we can. 

Part of the reason there haven't been many posts is that art is both the thing best suited to flashy PR stuff and the hardest, most time-intensive thing to do for a small volunteer project like ours. Still, the talented, venerable and long-suffering LordFryingPan has brought our steampunk-in-space world to life better than I ever could with words alone, and you can see some examples of life aboard the Familiarity yourself below.

Now that I've grabbed those fantastic photo-receptors of yours, I'd also like tell you about a shift in focus that we've decided to undertake.

Here's the space-skinny: originally, way back in the day, the plan was to have four routes, with four different heroines, written by four different writers. As time went on, the plans for the game solidified and the core team shrunk. Today, I (Lunch, hi) am the last writer standing, and while I have a rough plan for the other routes, I was intending to finish Sam's storyline first before trying to give the characters of Morial and Diane the stories they deserved. And the script for Sam's route is almost done, and I adore it, I really do. But it's taken me a long time to get this far. Longer than anyone had intended, longer than we could have asked for. If it comes down to finishing the game with one route or trying to do three and never finishing at all, we've chosen the former. 

So what does that mean? It means that Sam's story is now the main story of Familiarity. It's still a branching story with choice points, diverging paths and consequences for actions, and the other heroines will still be along for the ride. But we've made the difficult decision to restructure the game from a common first act and then three different routes to a single path. I know that's not what we originally promised, and I'm sorry if that's a disappointment. I'd say you could have your money back, but we've never asked for it and never will, we're still aiming for an eventual free release on Steam someday. So yeah. The work continues. We plan on eventually releasing all of Act One as a standalone demo, we're mostly just behind on sprite assets for that. Until next time. Be well.