Mithridatium release, hotfix and hints of things to come

Welcome to Nordmost Point.

Now that the 2023 MAY WOLF chaos is mostly behind us, I would like to slow down and write down what even happened here.
This little project was intended as an experiment where I could fuck around and find out in Ren'py in a controlled but low stakes environment. In that way, I think it was a great success. I went from knowing absolutely nothing about making a furry VN other than what I learned through osmosis by seeing devs talk, to actually making a small, complete game.

This game was made for a game jam, and I have the dubious honour of being the only participant of not meeting the deadline but also finishing a game, so I'd say it ended up being a positive after all. While being late made me miss out on some of the chaos that happened after the submission period ended, it was still a lot of fun and helped me learn and grow as an author immensely.

I was surprised by how much writing and art I managed to get done when under the pressure of a deadline, and learning the ways of this fickle little engine, how and where find and use free assets, and how to actually publish a game was all done in a shockingly short time.

With this devlog, I would like to announce the 1.01 version of the game, which differs from the original 1.0 version because it has some bug and typo fixes.

Changelog:

• ~12.5k words of content
• Linear story with one ending
• Original character sprites and illustration
• A lot of typos fixed (with probably many more left!)
  
• Functional credits that don't crash the game anymore! (Somebody accidentally broke the About page while adding the credits.)
• H*ndhol*ing before marriage

There are some small tweaks I would like to add this week, like an Android build and a custom game icon.

I might release an eventual future version that would have the game more polished and in a state that would be closer to what I had envisioned in the design document I created when joining the jam (which saw features scrapped one by one in an attempt to compromise with limited time and resources).

However, that is just wishful thinking, since I consider this game to be mostly concluded. I went into my first game jam with what turned out the be the wrong presumption that one is supposed to wrap up game development during the time limit and then never touch it again, catastrophic bugs aside. I learned how misguided that was, but I still would like to stick to that idea, since it was the guiding design philosophy I embarked onto this journey with.

Instead, I plan to make a postmortem, which would serve as a diary of all the challenges of furry VN development struggles. The intent would be to have me process what I've learned, demystify the development process of both this VN and in general at least a bit, and provide some kind of cypher key of the more dubious and esoteric moments Mithridatium has. I still want to discuss those, but I do not think they should be in the text itself.

While the story of what happened during a holiday in a medical institute on the coldest city of a tidally locked planet is finished, I do intend to do more with this setting and characters. Putting so much effort into building up the atmosphere and world instead of smooching the wolf was probably not the smartest decision, but it was planned one.

TL;DR

Expect:

• An Android version and a proper icon
• A post mortem
• Maybe a more polished version?
• More projects with this setting

Once again, thank you everyone for your support, especially the game jam organisers, fellows participants and other developers, who were all very kind and patient with a newcomer stumbling into this community 💙