Hey everyone!

It's been a bit since last update, but I promise, nothing bad has happened! The next major update, 1.3, is on the horizon. It's very nearly done in fact. 

But why has it taken so long? It's nothing to do with burnout or being too busy to work on CINIS. I have in fact been busy with working on CINIS, this just happens to likely be the biggest update I've ever made for a game. I won't be spoiling the content just yet, but it's a series of major overhauls, new features, and several tweaks and fixes. I'm quite excited for this one!

The 1.3 update won't only update the game in a linear fashion, it's innovating on a lot of aspects that I found lacking. It is also the last of the "cleanup" updates, planned for now. This means, in an perfect world, the next series of updates are content focused. There may still be more cleanup to do in the future, but 1.3 is the last exclusive / dedicated update to this field, so it's not unreasonable to expect major updates to be majorly content driven.

But, I also realize there is much content to make. So, there's a couple of changes that'll be made. Some to my communication style, some to the game itself and release of updates, and some focused solely on the business aspect.

Creating a company

You read that right, CINIS is going corporate. But what does that mean? Not much really lol, but fairly soon the game would be developed under a company name, as I'm registering a business. This doesn't really change anything when it comes to the final game - It just won't be a "self-developed" title, meaning it'll no longer be under just my name. So no investors, there won't be any crowdfunding or anything like that, it's not a profit driven venture. From a user perspective, nothing changes, except maybe a intro card saying the name of the company. That's all.

A larger operation

That leads into the actual development of the game. I'll still mostly be working solo on the project. I'm not hiring or bringing in a bunch of people (not for the foreseeable future), but, I am bringing in some help. First of which is my girlfriend who's already acted as a technical artist for CINIS survivor on one occasion, and will now be assisting longer-term on the future of CINIS. We've got some cool plans for new effects and graphical elements to add, and I look forward to showcasing it soon! I've also recently been starting to think more about the music of the game, and I hope to share something regarding this in the near future.

Teases and showcasing

That actually leads me to my last point. Showcasing stuff! For now, CINIS development has been mostly closed, There's been some teases as to what would come next, but outside of this, content would be shown off only when released.

This will change.

Showcases will happen more frequently to show off what is in development, as it's being made. How exactly this will happen is not 100% settled yet, but I have a proposal:

Small clips and pictures of what's being made would be posted to social media (mainly Twitter) relatively often. They would show off a single aspect of what's being worked on. Then slightly longer, "compilations" of what was posted there, would be added to a blog post here on Itch. Short posts could happen anytime as I see it right now, and the compilations would happen perhaps weekly, if the content is there to do so.

This showcasing plan above is not fully set in stone. This is the idea or goal for promoting CINIS and being more active in getting the game out there to more players. This move also goes hand-in-hand with the shift of focus from overhauls and cleanup to proper game content. It's not so exciting to see a bunch of post about all the cool behind the scenes changes to a saving system, or cleaning up place-holder / legacy gameplay which sometimes to the players make no immediate difference, outside of better allowing new features to exist. But, post update 1.3, there'll be a lot more interesting stuff to show-off and talk about (God willing), so I really, really look forward to being done with 1.3...

So, that's the plan! Both for the future and for like, right now. I'll crawl back to working on 1.3 as soon as I post this, and hopefully get it done very very soon :^)

Thanks for reading!