02/28/23 - "First Layer" Release on itch.io

Hello, again. This is Garrett Thompson, sole member of Act-Novel.

As promised in the previous Development Notes entry, I've been hard at work finishing the first major "chunk" of content for this project-- the first "layer", or "act", as I called it in said entry.

As anticipated, audio production took up the bulk of development time between October and December, as well as a bit of time in January. During this period, I wrote and produced 17 musical tracks (not including adaptive variants) as well as 173(!!) distinct sound effects. This was difficult, and I never want to do it ever again. But... I almost certainly will. Sigh...

Starting in mid-January, I conducted a small closed beta test of the game, partly to iron out its (many, many) performance and stability issues prior to releasing at a wider scale, and partly to gather general feedback from friends and acquaintances about its creative direction. Apart from a few especially tricky-to-diagnose bottlenecks,  the technical deficiencies of the project were simple to resolve, and the state of the code is much more solid than it was two months ago.

"More solid" doesn't necessarily mean "solid", of course. There is an understandable limit to how many different hardware configurations I can test the game on using this methodology. Thus, how these improvements will translate to the game's release into the wider world is anyone's guess. I can only pledge that I will do my utmost to continue supporting the game in the weeks following release as bug reports continue to roll in, as they almost certainly will. 

Did I mention that Act-Novel has an official support email, support@realitylayerzero.com? I hear it's a good place to send bug reports and other technical issues...

Fortunately as far as "my pride" is concerned, the creative side of the project was not the subject of any significant grievances during this test. How this will translate to the wider release, much like the technical side of things, is also anyone's guess. However, also fortunately for "my pride", grievances tend to manifest as apathy rather than outrage for a project of this size and level of visibility, meaning I won't be able to tell if people hate it or not. That means there's basically no pressure. Whew!

More to the point, as I'm sure you can infer from the paragraphs above (as well as the header image), the first "layer" of Reality Layer Zero is, at this time, finished! It's sitting on my hard drive (and in other places as well, in case of arson or unexpected volcanic activity), fully playable and feature-complete. Wow! So what's the hold-up? Why not release it right now??

Well, several reasons. Here they are in bulleted-list form:

• It seems like a good idea to me to let the small following I have know about the release date in advance. More chances for people to hear about it, and fewer chances for people to miss it-- I'm generally amenable to both of those effects. 
• I still want to run through the "release candidate" build of the game once or twice, myself, to see if there's anything in there that 1). would drive me crazy if I left it in there for the release, and 2). might not have been noticed by a playtester. This encompasses silly or esoteric bugs, subtle mistakes in the script or artwork, audio issues, and the like. At the moment, I'm quite exhausted from having just recently finished developing all of the content, though, so I don't want to dive back into testing just yet. A two-week buffer guarantees I have a comfortable amount of time to do this and, subsequently, fix the problems that I find.
• It's good to wait before releasing something, just as a general rule. Not only does it grant you the ability to make last-minute corrections, waiting also allows you to acquire some level of emotional distance from the outcome of the release. That is to say, the distance makes the unpleasant emotions one tends to feel during this immediately-post-release period (both external and internal in origin) somewhat easier to cope with. I find the release of a project, in many regards, the most disagreeable part of its lifecycle, so this waiting period is necessary just for my own sake.
• I (probably) need to update the store pages to better reflect the Visual Novel-y aspects of the game more, which have a greater emphasis than I had previously stated. I also need to take screenshots from moments in the game that didn't exist at the time I created the store pages.

That's broadly the reasoning. As you can tell from the header image, the current planned release date is February 28th, 2023 (the last day of the month, in fact). This is not likely to change... but there's nothing specifically holding me to that date, so, you know, maybe it will. 

... Probably not, though.

As mentioned in the header image, the release of the first layer will be temporarily restricted to itch.io. I do, of course, plan on eventually releasing the first layer onto Steam. For now, though, this will be the place for it. My reasoning here is pretty simple: I expect the volume of players on Itch to be orders of magnitude lower than on Steam. Itch is a smaller platform, after all. I hope that this will make the process of addressing issues discovered post-launch far less hectic for me. I hope. 

Once I feel that the itch.io release is solid, the very same version will be made downloadable through the Steam client as a public demo.  If you'd prefer to download the game through Steam, you will not likely have to wait for very long following the Itch release to do that. As to specifically how long you'll have to wait, I'm not quite sure yet, but I think less than one month is probably a reasonable estimate.

In summary: Game done, short wait. First Itch, then Steam. Please play! I'm tired.

Thank you for reading. As always, thoughts or questions are welcome. 

I hope you come back on February 28th (or, you know, whenever) to play through the first layer!