Hi everyone! Wow,  it's certainly been a while, huh?

So first and foremost, I just want to say: ShipMates is still being worked on! I have no intention of abandoning this project any time soon. With that being said, though, there's a lot to talk about in terms of development.

Since the game jam, a lot has happened. Entering the game jam was somewhat last minute in the first place, and the team was somewhat thrown together. What this lead to was some people deciding they didn't have the time to continue working on the project long-term. Long story short, we pretty only much have two people actively working on ShipMates right now, which means development is going to take a whole lot longer than originally anticipated.  Sadly, our two team members are also working full-time jobs and have other commitments, so we can't dedicate a lot of time into the project. Fear not, however! We're going to push on, and we've managed to make at least a bit of progress over the past few months! Without further ado, let's get into that progress, shall we?

Writing

We've had plenty of time to look at what we'd written for the first three chapters of the game, and while we love the current direction, we were a little rushed with the game jam deadline and ended up writing a lot of things without knowing where they were going to lead farther down the line. As such, we're doing a heavy amount of editing on the beginning, so if you've already played the demo, you can look forward to the full release having plenty of new stuff! The demo comes out to about 20,000 words (WOW), and the plan is to make each individual route twice that length. With the three current routes, that means the final game will probably be well over 140,000 words, meaning we're looking at somewhere around 6 hours of total playtime. That's longer than the average novel (at least, according to Wikipedia). While we have a general idea of how each route is going to flow, our current focus is editing those first three chapters.

GUI

The GUI of the game is quite possibly the thing I was most unhappy with on release. I was still very new to Ren'Py, and it took me a long time to figure out how to properly customize everything. Because of that, things ended up looking very generic, and overall not very nice. Since the demo release, however, I've put a lot more time into the overall look of the menus, and I think they're going to look much better! Here's a mock up of some of the planned changes:

You can also see here the new color palette, as well as the new logo and a much improved main menu graphic. This isn't the final design, but it's much closer to what I was originally imagining when we started the project. Most importantly, here's a couple of options for a new text box:

Moving Forward

That's all of the major announcements we have for now. Progress may be slow, but at least it's happening! Hopefully, I'll be back soon with another progress update for you all. Until then, thank you all for playing, following, and showing your support. Don't forget to follow us on social media using the links below!

• Facebook: facebook.com/ShipMatesGame
• Tumblr: shipmatesmarooned.tumblr.com
• Twitter: twitter.com/ShipMatesGame