Dev Update #1: The story so far

Steam page finally live! Welcome everyone!

It's great to finally get visibility on Steam! I'm super happy, excited but, at the same time, also a bit terrified. I think those are emotions of every developer who's game is nearing its release date. I wanted to start off with a rather quick status report: how much of the game is done, what are the near term plans and what to expect in the future.

The story so far

Bonding, Now has been in the works for quite a long while already. Even though this is basically an RPG Maker visual-novel type game, creating content always takes time - especially with dialogue and choices. Especially here since I needed to add a lot of custom code for the purpose of various stories! In the end, I get a feeling that it can take up to 2 hours to create meaningful 5-10 minutes of gameplay. And considering the fact that Bonding, Now is only a side project worked on after-hours, progress is slower than one would expect.

That being said, there is already a lot of fun content ready! As a reminder, Bonding, Now is composed of multiple Stories usually independent of each other. You, the players, select which story to play and switch between them freely. So it's easy to track progress of the project by looking at the completion of each story. Let's take a look at that in detail:

• Story 1: Ronin Camp

  Story is fully complete and ready to play!

• Story 2: The Room

  Also complete, although this story is a bit shorter than the others.

• Story 3: Eclipse

  This one is still in progress, and will probably be finalized after release in following updates.

• Story 4: Game Master

  This one is nearing completion, I'd say it's 90% there. Still needs some content and artworks drawn, but it's close.

• Story 5: Summer Bonds

  This one is still in progress as well, but the idea here is to continuously work and improve. This story is a bit different than the others, as it's my experiment of making an old-school dating simulator, where the player is given more freedom on what to do and with who. For release, I expect only limited playability here.

Upcoming plans

Top three priorities in the next weeks are:

1. Finalizing Story #4

2. Making day 1 from Story #5 fully playable

3. Constructing a demo for the upcoming Next Fest on Steam!

As mentioned, Story #5 is a bit special. Since it is more of a dating simulator than the usual visual novel 'linear' gameplay, there is time flow and various events taking place at different times of day. I expect to have day 1 fully finalized by the time of Next Fest. But before official release I'd like Story #5 to have at least a week of ingame play ready - but we'll see how it goes.

Then I would finally like to spend more time on Story #3. It's also a 'special' case, different than others, as there will be no sexually explicit scenes in that one. It's more of a classic, old-school detective story, where the player will be gathering clues, talking to suspects. A mix of detective, mystery, noir and occult. The amount of artwork needed there is lower, but I want to spend some uninterrupted time to make the experience proper.

The future

As mentioned on both the steam page and the game website, Bonding, Now is like a medium for visualizing my (and my partner's) fantasies. Because of