Saninsakin! 

We’ve released the v0.255 build of S&M.

Regarding the details of that, we’d like to note a major shift that occurred during the development of the now-delayed Episode 2.

Throughout S&M’s production, it has evolved and mutated a number of times, always for the better, and due (almost entirely) to the decisions of our team. This update marks another mutation of the project, as we have opted to move away from having voices for our cast, largely due to outside forces, and one notable incident that left our team incredibly uncomfortable.

The decision can largely be attributed to it simply being something a bit too ambitious for our team to achieve in its current iteration, as the work it took to record and code the nearly 2,000 lines featured in the entirety of Episode 1 was (as one can imagine) ridiculous.

The quickly growing file size, even in spite of compression, was another concern, as Episode 1 alone clocked in at around 350mb. By our estimation, the final project would easily reach over 1gb at that rate, if not surely more. Given that almost a third of this size was from the audio alone, this served as another significant factor when we took stock of the direction we were going in.

The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was a number of racially charged comments made about the voices provided for our cast shortly following the release of the second build. Ultimately, these comments brought us into internal discussions that culminated in us staring at a number of paths forward–and being forced to make decisions we hadn’t imagined would ever be presented to us.

While we loved having our cast be given voices, especially when it came to increasing the accessibility of our story and fleshing out of our world, it will (for now) remain something that we cannot invest our time and resources into, and something that our team has grown weary of.

The removal of the voices has presented the opportunity for some other major alterations to be made to the script. As such, Episode 2 will be delayed, with us now targeting a v0.3 release including these changes, rather than the originally planned v0.275. This work will take some time, and as such, we cannot provide a schedule at this point.

This release, v0.255, serves as a stop-gap. A proverbial band-aid to the issues we’re now beginning to dissect. It remains largely unaltered to the v0.255 release, save for some minor corrections and fixes–but has had all voices stripped from it, resulting in the drastic downsizing of its file size.

We’ll be adding a v0.255 Android port soon, though for the moment we do not yet have it available.

With all of that, it’s not to say we’re closing up shop–far from it! Due to the scale of S&M, we want to be thoughtful in our approach (read: these things take time!)–but that doesn’t mean our production schedule is now barren. Instead, we’ll be directing our efforts to The Mirror Eater, a self-contained prequel to S&M that was already far along in production when we began examining this situation.

The first build of TME will be available 04.26.24, the original slot we planned for the next S&M release.

We thank you all for your support and understanding with all of this!

’Til next time.

-Lajos

Got a question? Want to chat? We can be reached at ProjectUlysses13@gmail.com.