I hope you guys have been enjoying 0.5 so far!

This was a massive update, so regardless of how much QA we did before release, it was unavoidable that issues would pop up. We decided to put together an 0.5.1 update to address these issues, but we also let a couple weeks pass to collect your feedback and add a lot of quality of life improvements to the game, especially on the daily agenda. Note that this isn't a story update, but we'll discuss that a little more below.

Before proceeding, the image we're using as the DevLog's cover art is this fantastic piece of fan art by alpha0, which was kindly commissioned by RodrigoJacoboS. Thank you, and thank you to everyone who's been sending us their amazing fan art — you can look forward to the next fan art expo, that will be a good one.

Changelog

Here's the list of changes:

• Fixed a lot of typos spotted throughout the game.
• Added a progress bar to the daily agenda sidequests, so players get a better idea whether they're worth the time investment or not.
• On the desktop version, information and menus for characters on the team management screen are now displayed when clicking and not hovering, which plenty of players found annoying to navigate.
• Added an "available projects" tab on the daily agenda that shows the possible R&D projects the player can work towards and their requirements.
  
• Added an "idle" column to the daily agenda screen, since players kept forgetting to assign guests that were not busy.
  
• Accumulated danger and surveying stats are no longer displayed for math background players, since they don't really contribute to new rewards (and danger in particular makes players think there are negative consequences for piling it up and refuse to put characters on exploration).
• Increased font size on some clickable elements like confirmation messages, since they're finicky and hard to click on mobile.
• Removed some confirmation messages on the daily agenda to make navigation faster.
  
• Added a button on the quick menu to go directly to the files.
• Just for the record, some people requested a button on the mobile version to hide the UI. This is already there. It's the eye.
• By popular demand, the achievements menu can now be accessed during regular gameplay and not just the main menu.
• Added a small mention of Greta's project folder and the player character's lead armband not being poisonous, since enough people asked about what happened with both of those.
• Fixed a bunch of bugs, including:
  • The cobalts no longer appear on the waiter uniforms at the start of 0.5 if the player loads an 0.4.1 save from the end of build message.
  • A "stop here if you're doing QA" message at the start of chapter 18 has been deleted.
  • Some small dialogue changes meant to play out differently if the player tricked argos on the first encounter didn't happen, they do now. It's not very substantial but still worth fixing.
  •  When moving characters around through drag and drop on mobile, sometimes the selected sidequest was not reset.
• Added a couple more community-suggested responses Jean can give to your contact name.

Here's a look at the improvements made on the daily agenda (this is a screencap of a playthrough with the Math background, so it shows the exact number next to the progress bar).

(Yeah, the projects screen is a little barebones as of now, since most of 0.5's new rewards are on Exploration, but we'll add more soon).

Most of these issues were brought up both in the form and in the forum, so please continue doing so! We couldn't address all of them on this update (some were difficult to implement, like queuing songs on the music menu, some required rewrites), but we'd like to get to it in the future.

Production Update

As a general update on upcoming content... we're still on break. But, we have begun mapping out and planning the rest of the game and making a general "bare minimum plot beats and character moments we'll include" list for 0.6. We're doing our best to keep the next builds smaller, but still substantial, so we'll take a while before we get there.

However, we will most likely release an 0.5.2 update (maybe more?) before 0.6 comes out, which would expand on some hinterlands locations, add new R&D projects and exploration rewards, give some much needed rewrites to Luke's introductory scene, and redrawing some old sprites that enough people complained about. I'm looking at you, Greta. We'll keep her old sprite on the speedrunner route just because she's become a bit of a meme at this point.

And, of course, adding more optional scenes with the side characters. On the form, we asked you guys which character should get some route content first...

... so we will start with Kota, most likely.

— Nanoff.

Thank you

Hi! Nanoff was so kind as to write the DevLog so far, but I (MinoAnon) will be taking over now to deliver a brief message.

It's been 15 days since we released Build 0.5, the product of almost a year's worth of work. The response to it can only be described as unprecedented compared to all other updates we released before it. The messages we received conveyed such a wealth of affection and enjoyment for the game, and the comments we've read show that many of you are engaging with the game in such a deep, thoughtful level. We're all incredibly humbled to have such a thoughtful audience that really dissects the themes, shares their theories, and brings up our flaws so we can learn from them.

Now that it's been two weeks since the game released we can speak more openly about the game's contents, as doing so before would have spoiled the surprises. Now, I hope, you can appreciate why Build 0.5 had to be so big and couldn't be split into smaller and frequent updates. We wanted the mystery, the build-up, the development, the gigantic pay-off to come all in one go so that players would experience the full roller coaster ride we envisioned.

We stuck to our creative vision and delivered it. Now I can't describe how glad and happy we are that you, our readers, enjoyed and engaged with the story.

Art is a way for people to connect with others, and I think we managed to connect through all of this. Hopefully we managed to bring a little bit of joy to you guys after this horrible year.

We look forward to bringing you more joy further down the road. Thank you for sticking with us, and check the Forum if you want to talk with others about the game. We have some ace detectives there trying to connect all the dots.

— MinoAnon