It's been... six days-ish since we handed in the LotW demo and I'm still walking around in a daze. 

The last two months have been a wild ride, in the best sense of the word. The people who worked on LotW are some of the coolest I've ever had the pleasure of meeting and I've made friends for life y'know, Otojam trauma bonding. 

Above all, it’s been… fun. Fun and crunch don't usually belong in the same sentence, so you know you’ve got something really good going on when it’s 5 am on the day of the deadline, you’re coding in endless expressions and you’re STILL just really happy to be alive and a part of it all.

The team's done so much work in such a small time frame:  

• 75k+ words
• 11 unique backgrounds (plus a billion variations on them) 
• 30 sprites (the side characters were too fun not to deserve a sprite) and too many expressions to count
• 1250+ voice acted lines (plus wayyyyyyyyyy *deep breath* yyyyyyyyyyyyyy too many soundbites) 
• 7 completely original songs and a few more on the way
• Countless SFX and custom ambience
• Custom bubbles, character customisation, item mechanic, camera shenanigans
• So. Many. Moving. Bits.

On the one hand, we’ve done incredible, on the other there's still a lot to go. There are items to wrangle and routes to polish. Everything is… mostly done, but most things aren’t done-done, if that makes sense. 

We'll go over the nitty-gritty of the development process in the post-mortem for the demo. For now, we're addressing the question on everyone’s minds (or mine, really, and you’re just being forced to come along with me on this ego trip).

What comes next?

We spent a few days mulling this over. Full-release? Episodic? By route?

In the end, we settled on a Full Release… but with internal Milestones. 

What the duck does that mean? 

What that means is we'll be doing a series of mini, unofficial releases as we go. 

Shorter goals, shorter deadlines, more accountability, better beta-testing. Keep ourselves from entering the endless cycle of 'just one more thing' and get the game out in manageable chunks.

The next mini-release is tentatively scheduled for August 1st 2023 and will contain approximately the same word count as the demo.

What does that mean for ME specifically?

We've created a Discord Server for LotW where we'll be unleashing these smaller releases into the wild, as well as more internal updates/sneak peeks. 

If you're interested in keeping up with LotW, joining the community, chatting with us, reading the Viriam smutty fanfic and helping us playtest the next few chapters, you can join us there! You can snag a playtester role on your way in if you want to have access to those specific categories, as well as a non-playtester role for funsies.

Anything else you want to ramble on endlessly about?

Why thank you, yes, I'd like that.

The reviews and general feedback we've been getting for LotW have been incredible — you're all amazing 😭❤️  If you haven't rated/reviewed yet, please consider doing so, as it helps LotW get seen/found/played by more people. 

...

Ye-p. 

That's all from me and I hope you have an awesome day. 🦆