Happy Friday, people! Or... not-people, depending on who you may be. You know who you are.

It's time for our weekly update! YAY! But wait... why does it say BIG Friday Update? Because there's big news! I hope you're sitting down for this.

Unless you're at one of those stand-up desks, I guess. Not my style. I want a lay-down desk. Do they make those?

Oh, right, sorry. The announcement. 

Mythos: Book One, Chapter Two will be releasing publicly on September 17th!

Yes, that's one week from today.

This means that Patrons of the "Rain's Employee ($5)" and higher tiers will be getting their download links later today, and "Mara's Partner ($1)" Patrons will get their links on September 14th.

What's in Chapter Two?

Well, obviously... the second chapter of the story! This means:
- 13 new scenes (there were 13 scenes in Chapter One as well. Curious.)
- 6 new animations
- 31 new music tracks
- New visual indicators for important sound cues (for the hearing impaired and for people like me who play games muted)
- New title screen
- (Android Only) A "Hide Text" button added to the quick menu, so you can see images without the words blocking the lower bits (you know what I mean)

We have a trailer?!

Last night I released a trailer for Mythos! You can check that out here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uchC3zTyups

The Future of Mythos

Making this chapter was rough. It took me about 7 months to put this one out, while Chapter One took me maybe 4. There's a whole bunch of reasons for this; it's a much more complicated chapter, there's a lot of story that has to be conveyed in a way that (hopefully) isn't boring, and the branching paths really start to take root in the penultimate scene. Also, in Chapter One there were very few instances of multiple NPCs interacting together; Sophia and B's Cyberdaze battle and the Waitress dealing with your shit. 

Not just game-related, but there were also a few real-world occurrences that slowed things down, as I've mentioned in these updates. Car crises, adjusting to Morgana's new work schedule, birthdays, anniversaries, a wedding, my dad cut his finger off (I dunno if I mentioned that bit, so... yeah, that happened)... being as Mythos isn't my full-time job, and I'm the only one working on it (with a few things done by Morgana), slowdowns affect my progress exponentially. 

I don't plan to have another "huge scene" like "Teri's Eleven" for the next chapter or two, so hopefully there won't be another seven month wait for Chapter Three. However, unforeseen shit happens all the time; this is why I don't give release dates until the update is fully done. For supporters, I completely understand if you cancel or pause your support if you feel like things are going too slowly. If ever there comes a time that Mythos makes me enough money to retire from my real world job (highly unlikely), then that will change of course. 

Also, starting with Chapter Three, I'm going to be changing a fundamental bit of how the game is coded. For those of you who don't poke around in my code or use third-party walkthrough mods, this won't really mean anything to you. In the first two chapters, there were a bunch of "points". Each of the girls had an affection rating, and there were attributes tied to the main character like "brave", "funny", and "spirit." These numerical values changed based on the decisions you made. However, for most of these decisions you were also setting a "flag". For example, if you said you hated Tara's music in her truck scene, that gave you increased affection with Tara (that wasn't a mistake -- she loves arguing, and you gave her an opening for it), but it also set a flag so that the game would remember you made fun of her music.

As I was trying to balance these points and how they affected various things, I realized that I don't really need the points at all. If every meaningful decision sets a flag, the points are meaningless because the flags are already there to keep track of what you've been doing. Plus, not every decision will be quite as meaningful. It's a lot easier in my mind to keep track of the flags than "gamify" affection ratings and character attributes. Starting with Chapter Three, your current points will be converted into flags and will no longer be awarded (or deducted) for future choices. I'm not recoding Chapter One or Two for this, because I'd probably break my game so hard that it'd break every other game on your hard drive.

This also means that people snooping in the code won't know what these decisions mean until later on. There's no "game over" in Mythos, so just make the choices you want your character to make! The choices that affect which girls you get intimate with are very obvious, because the relationship/sex isn't really the focus of the game. If you want the "best path" as far as which girl/girls you end up with, it's as simple as saying "yeah, I like her" when the choice presents itself. Solving the murder won't be so straightforward, though...

As a warning: I do plan on taking some time off from developing in Mythos in late November/early December. The reason for this vacation is that Final Fantasy XIV's new expansion (Endwalker) is dropping, and I will be playing through all that new content. FFXIV is the one game I play, and this is a pretty big deal. I may pause the Patreon for that month, depending on how long it takes me to get through it all. 

This was rather long-winded, and I bet there was stuff I wanted to say that I forgot about, so I'll leave it at this for now. 

Things Completed: 
- Everything 

Things In Progress:
- Nothing

Things To Do:
- Take a fucking break for once
- Keep the Legends Alive

Nine 💜