It’s been long past a year since the last time I released a new version. I hate being kept in the dark about things I like just as much as most people, so I think some transparency is in order. I’ll be outlining exactly what has been going on since the September 2017 release as best as I can recall them.

Minor spoilers for the unreleased continuation of Chapter 5 below this point.

Ever since I completed Chapter 2, I’ve always taken at least a month away from working on the game in order to catch up on my other hobbies, and other personal stuff. Up until mid November 2017, I was taking a break from Exadimension Neptunia. At this point in time, the whole plot of the game had not been fully realized yet, and introducing the Makers to the game was initially going to be for the sake of misdirection. I had planned for the Makers to only play a minor role in the story and have them leave by Chapter 6. This might sound like I’m making the story up as I go along, but trust me on this when I say that I at this stage I already had a planned ending in mind. Bridging the gap between Chapter 5 and Chapter 7 was the real challenge that I had.

The original plan for the continuation was for the Makers to assist from the sidelines rather that play a significant active role for the rest of the Chapter. I worked on this idea from December 2017 until the end of February 2018 where I realized that it would be a horrible idea both from a developer perspective, and a player perspective, that I came up with these semi-original designs only to throw them away eventually. I decided that I wanted to make all the Makers playable, not just Blizza. I asked for help from my friends who were much more knowledgeable about Valve and EA than me to see what could work well, as well as taking a look at what I had for Blizzard. As seen in the cutscene where you first meet the Makers, I already had some sort of idea for what I wanted them to do, but not yet any thought into how they would translate into actual SP skills in battle.

From the entirety of March to April 2018, my academics proved to be the biggest roadblock, meaning I barely had time to focus on the game. In the meantime, I worked on rewriting Chapter 5 and 6 to fit the new narrative, which didn’t require me to be on my computer. By the second week of May, I finally had sufficient time, a clear outline of the story moving forward, and a planned skill set for each of the makers. And so from this point I worked on the game. Work was divided between changing event markers in maps that I had already made in order to fit the adjusted story, and adding new content to follow up on them. This is what I’d be doing until late July where my computer’s hard drive decided it didn’t want to work anymore.

I’ve already talked about that before. While I only lost about a month of progress, it’s still a major upset considering 1. the next version was supposed to be almost done and 2. most of the progress lost was when I finally had time to work on the game uninterrupted. Ever since that happened, it’s been difficult to go back and work on the game. I tried to target an October 2018 release but all the motivation had been sucked out of me. Late November, I’ve been somewhat in the mood to work on the game again little by little, but nowhere near the amount of progress per week or the enthusiasm I had before I lost progress.

I think I’m finally ready to start seriously working on the game again. I sincerely apologize for the long delay and I hope you’re all still here, either working with me through the releases and giving feedback/reporting bugs, or patiently waiting for when the game is completed to play uninterrupted. My release policy from when I updated my previous Devlog still stands. The next version will be uploaded as soon as it’s done, and I won’t be avoiding any overlap with official Neptunia releases.