Devlog: What's Next?

Hi, So the new demo is out in the wild and the feedback I've received so far as been super positive. Have you played it? What do you think? I love hearing from players so do reach out (even if you only have bad things to say!) I've been sitting on this devlog for a little while, waiting for something concrete to show and announce. But frankly I don't have anything to show yet, so I just wanted to show a pulse. I'm busy working on the Early Access release. That was slated for July but that's gonna slip hard. I'm hoping for end of August. I've been working on producing a roadmap to make it a bit clearer what I'm working on and what's involved. My plan is to work this up into something nice and visual and share it next month. But to summarise, I've been polishing up the quality of the opening chunk of the game - the stuff that happens before the Red Tie demo. I'm just about to hand out some voiceover work to my actors which always an exciting step in the process. And once the audio comes back I'm probably at the absolute minimum point where I could launch. This week I've had art delivered for two new CG scenes and I can't wait to plug those in. One is for Olivia's storyline, which I hope to had a couple of releases after early access (so October/November). The other may just slip into the early access build though. Sadly I expect a lot of pressure on my working hours in July. As some of you may know, I work on contracts to fund the art, music and voice for Private Dick - it's a tricky balance to earn enough to fund development while also leaving me enough time to actually DO development (not forgetting, of course, that handing out, reviewing and integrating work from the team also take a lot of my time). And sometime those contracts have responsibilities attached, which means I'm not entirely in control of my time. Are any of us, I suppose? There's a big tension on the EA build as to what goes in it. I want to give paying players something new and exciting and entertaining. Ideally at least an hour of content. On the other hand, the sooner I release and start generating revenue from the game, the more I can wind down contracting hours and the more time I can spend on development. But if the first release is too thin, and players are disappointed, and I start clocking up bad reviews, well, that might get hard to recover from. This is something I'm always weighing up. I know where I want the EA build to be, but that may be too much content for me to fund and add right now. So I'm always trying to work out where to cut, where to optimise, to get to a releasable point. Anyway that's all for now - I really just wanted to check in quickly. I hope to write in a few weeks with a more concrete and visual roadmap so that you have a better idea of where development is at. Cheers, -Cisco