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Status Update and Future Plans
🕑 Added 2020-04-16 19:26:06 +0000 UTC Hello everyone.
We made a conscious decision that the fans of these pages and those that are actively supporting us should be hearing from us far more often. So, this is more of that initiative to make sure you don’t go more than two weeks without hearing from us.
I know it goes without saying what kind of expectations you all had been waiting a long time for an update on Amity Park. It had clearly been a good while since the previous one, which we were all glad that many of you enjoyed as well. Now that it’s finally come out, I’m sure many of you are thrilled to get a hold of it, but perhaps with some trepidation as well. As many of you well know, the recent update just came out for the public for everyone to enjoy.
Unfortunately, a portion of content was decided to be put into the second half of the update. The “Part 2” update for Episode 7, as it were, and we’ve already made some great work in that development. The Trello pages should be going live soon, both public and private, to let you guys in on our progress. The only real reason we tackle putting out updates in secondary chunks is because we believe that the written episode simply has too much content/assets to get out quickly. We know how ironic this may be, considering how long it still takes us to get the first portion done. But, when we’re planning everything out, it feels like the smarter plan at least at the time.
The biggest issue that has slowed down the development of our games has been the assets required of me, the primary artist. This includes things such as character portraits, h-scene animations, graphical user interfaces, line work/optimization on backgrounds, and any other elements to do with what you actually see when you play our games. As a previous post informed you of as well, LNSC isn’t quite able to work with us full time anymore, unfortunately. Now I can work at a reasonably good pace as an artist, but while also working my day job still, it’s a bit of an issue to find enough time to get through all the work required for a single update. So, we’ve been both planning out the future content as well as figuring out how to alleviate our workload for asset creation.
To that end, I’ve taken a few necessary steps to hire on and make contact with readily available artists, portrait posers, and animation experts to gain some help. I’ve basically been teaching myself new methods of animation and getting some help from others taught in the way. They’re going to help lighten the load of not only myself, but our main portraiter Epadder as well. Splitting up work amongst other people will be of great help to the project’s middle work, I believe.
Now that you know what we’ve been working on and how we’re looking to complete this second half update, I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the future. Some of this stuff you may have heard before in parts, either through Discord, forums, or even the occasional art stream. But we want to lay it all out on the table for you guys. For Amity Park alone, we currently have three objectives in play/planned out. The first of course being the second half of episode 7. That will include the remaining other plotlines related to Ember’s main quest, and content that can be explored through separate playthroughs.
The second part in the plan is something a bit different however, and it’s been something we’ve had in the works for a long time now. It’s essentially what we’d call Amity Park’s “Redux” or “enhanced” version. Since we came together as a fully-fledged dev group under the banner of “Team Bieno”, a whole lot has changed and improved. Writing style, creative feedback, coding techniques, my own art style and my general ambition with the games I originally set forth to create. I’m definitely not the quintessential one-man dev team that I was when I first started out in this particular business. That is why, with a proper and agreed upon plan in place, I’d like to “remedy” a few of the things that I started out as the base for Amity Park.
Okay, what the heck am I talking about, you might be asking? Essentially, we have a checklist: a huge checklist of objectives and tasks that the staff, alongside the ever-forthright fans of ours (You guys), have come up with to improve about Amity Park. Ideas that we originally had in mind but didn’t have time for, things we forgot or didn’t think about adding, or things that we’ve come up with that we think will be awesome additions. Basically, think of it as a massive update changelog… except that none of it has actually been implemented or completely decided upon just yet. We’ve got that planned out after the second Ember update is released, so we’ll be able to go through all those ideas and decide what we like as concepts and what we might not. But, in essence, it’d be a pretty big production overhaul, with new content, features, design changes, and just a dozen different “Quality of Life” changes we think will make the game so much more enjoyable (Fixing those damn Dragon fights! ;P )
Now, our second step may take some time to get to where we really want it to be. So, over time, you may see us create iterations of the “Redux” update come out. It may not be one big thing, but merely a road map for us to follow along on. This will certainly be the biggest sort’ve update for us to produce, so just be patient with us as we work on it!
Thirdly, and rounding it out for us in terms of main objectives, is merely a new update, one focused specifically on… that one character! With the hair! And the blue headband! Hope you all know who that is!
All of this and more will be because of you guys, and your tireless desire to see the game improve and be made more out of. We at Team Bieno believe that Amity Park could be treated in high esteem as one of the best games in its genre. That belief is compounded by your support and your engagement with us, so we greatly thank you.
Just to wrap things up, we have a couple random things to show you, just to give you a sense of some new production assets already in the making. Take a look!
Stay safe out there,
-GZone & Team Bieno 
