Dev Update #5: On the road to release

Happy New Year everyone! I really wanted to get Bonding, Now ready by Valentines Day... alas, things usually take longer than one originally assumes. Let's start this devlog with some updates.

From good news: Story #4, featuring Nabi and Eclipse, is now completed! This is quite the important milestone as finishing up this story was my number one requirement for release. This means the game is really close to a releasable state!

With this, the game now has 3 fully complete stories:

• Story #1 - the one available in the demo; three friends going on a martial arts camp together. This one features Leia as the main love interest.
  
• Story #2 - two people wake up in a room with no doors or windows. Featuring a the troublesome character of Gretta (not present in Story #5).
  
• Story #4 - a long weekend of a group of four friends, embarking on a fantasy pen-and-paper adventure... and more. The latest addition and I think so far the longest short-story of them all. Features Nabi and Eclipse.

Before release what I still need to do is testing and tweaking. This might feel quick and easy, but I already noticed while working on the demo: there's so much tweaking needed, really. We need to remember that the content in Story #1 and #2 is already around 2 years old. Getting back to them after such a long time, I frequently see dialogue and/or scenes that need rewriting or rearranging. But it's good. Such 'baking time' just adds quality.


So when will the actual release happen? Besides testing, I wanted to add a bit more content to the ever-going Story #5, but not too much more. There's also some 'help' text that I'd like to prepare for each story, but that shouldn't take too long. I think all of this is achievable in around a months time. So I'd say 1-2 months more and it's out!
Around that time I'd like to spend more time on social media advertisement: go out and spread the word of Bonding, Now a bit.

Would love to get a basic achievement system working before release. But I won't block on that; this can come with the next update as well.

This reminds me: I recently created media profiles on both Bluesky and Mastodon. I'm a bit on the geeky side, and I don't really like or use X/Twitter. You can find those here:

• https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@zenco
  
• https://bsky.app/profile/zencogames.bsky.social

I'll be posting some less-official updates there. And a bit more frequently too.


But at least I think I have all the drawing content finalized, for now. I'd like to use the occasion to address the elephant in the room (and I will multiple times in the future): I really can't draw too well. I love drawing, don't get me wrong, but to get any more involved scene drawn, I need sooo many references. Seriously, SOOO many references. If you a scene and feel it looks familiar to you, there are high chances that maybe you saw a photo somewhere already that I used while working on it. I try to ask my partner to help me, and we sometimes photograph each-other to get reference angles/poses. But there's stock references from all over the world as well.

What can you do. Maybe one day I get good enough not to need all of this. You are all witnessing skill evolution first-hand here..!