Howdy-ho! We're in the later stretch of July, and on top of my own birthday coming up, I've been focusing on Artfight like I said, so I've been a little busy.

That being said, however, I have been managing to steadily sneak in some work on my off-time, doing things like updating characters' older refs (namely Aezarch, Lia, Eucidyes, and Mize), as well at tackling bits of the outline at a time. Progress has been good for what little it has been, and I'm probably about... 50% done with outline work? The Fae route is done, but I've been wrestling with the Magic one as it kind of veered off into stuff that would be better for the Godly route, oops--

The way things are going, each route will have about 6 chapters, with a couple intermissions spaced between them.

But that brings us to the meat of this update, and what I've come to ask of all of you!

For the next update, I would like to at the very least introduce the primary story mechanic, which would be to loop through the story after you hit the end of a route or a game over. However, because of how this needs to be introduced in terms of characters, I'm having trouble finding a natural point to put this in at the end of the first chapter for each route, as it requires Greg to... Well, die. 

I discussed things a little bit with my dev team, and basically have come down to a few different choices:

1. Keep the First Chapter of Each Chapter structure and save the looping mechanic for a later update

This is... Definitely the least preferred, at least by me. I feel if I don't introduce this mechanic with the next substantial update, it'd be hard to actually show you all what the game is supposed to be like. The alpha demo was supposed to be a 'Here's the characters and what you might expect from them!' kind of thing, and even now, there's going to be major changes to that structure to better suit them.

The next update to the demo is supposed to be 'and here's what you can expect from the game as a whole' before we start making plans for what we'd like to do in terms of development to see this game to completion--I would rather introduce the main mechanic of the game while things are still free rather than shove a crowdfund or something at you without having a solid example of what the game will be first. That's just kinda... Crappy, yanno?

However, it does put less worry, stress, and work on the dev team, so there's that.

2. Continue the routes until Greg actually has a chance to die 

This would be about halfway into chapter 2 for each of the routes, so it wouldn't be too much further, but would definitely take a bit longer in terms of development. I might have to tweak the exact situations later on, so the deaths you have may not stay the same in a later update, but at the very least, it would be a more natural introduction of how the looping mechanic will work for the game: Greg dies, and is given the option to start from the beginning, potentially changing things with different choices. They wouldn't exactly be the intended points at which the mechanic would normally be introduced, but at the very least it gets things on the plate in a smoother method.

3. Focus on one route rather than all three

This one would... Definitely be lengthy. As said, each route has about six chapters plus intermissions, so that would be a lot of time and work. However, it would allow for the mechanic to be introduced as intended, as the looping mechanic isn't actually supposed to come into play until you first see a route to its completion.

Of course, that would also mean there isn't really much you could do with said mechanic, since it's primarily supposed to affect the other routes as you go into them with new knowledge (though if you repeat a route, it wouldn't be without its own changes)

And if this one is selected, there will likely be another poll to figure out which route to focus on. As mentioned, I'm about 50% through writing all of the outlines, with the Fae route complete and Magic route about halfway done, only having just started the Great Sea route. But should people want, say, the GS route, then I will of course focus on that and get that done.

4. Something else?

Perhaps I'm overthinking things a bit? Maybe I'm glossing over something I could do? I'm genuinely not sure, but definitely wouldn't mind hearing if any of you have other suggestions to make this work a bit smoother. 

AND THUS! This has been a very very long explanation of the choices I am now presenting you in this Google Forms poll. 

Go ahead and take it, it's literally one question, and the space for option 4 is just where you can input your suggestion.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScUBUBb-ZcWUo1myqVVVhxmL3lgEFYSSFJJBkw_...

Thank you for reading this far and voting! I'll be sure to keep an eye on things and see what the general consensus is, then discuss what the dev team thinks would be feasible alongside what people want. Catch you later!