v1.01 Now onto the big reason for this patch:
For those of you who felt burned by the outcome of the casual path for the two main LI’s, we know we dropped the ball.
While we feel the girls’ dissatisfaction with the casual arrangement was adequately telegraphed, we also never provided an offramp for the player to right the ship. That both violates the spirit of our “no gotcha” statement at the beginning of the game, and it’s objectively obvious that the result was unduly punitive.
I (Stoya) take ownership for that as the writer, and legitimately felt gut-punched the moment I realized that no escape hatch had been provided. I can only offer my word that it wasn’t intentional or malicious, and began planning a fix for this the moment I realized the enormity of the miss.
As such, we are adding a scene to Chapter 9 near the beginning after the Lexi concert. This scene will provide two choices where the player can exercise agency before the girls start making decisions on his behalf.
To be clear, it will NOT add endings that were never planned for, nor does it violate the integrity of the story as planned. I also want to point out that this scene does not exist in a bubble just to change a variable. The fact that this scene occurred will be reflected in other conversations throughout the chapter.
If the player was on a committed path, the scene will offer no stat changes and they have no need to replay. There will just be be some banter and a little more visible bonding between primary characters.
v1.0
As of today, Chasing Sunsets contains just shy of 16000 renders, 200K words of story and dialogue, nearly 150 pieces of music, and nearly 300 different sound effects.
Our game contains nearly 100 different characters with speaking roles, and has 204 achievements.
Chapter 9 explores a world that has grown smaller for our protagonists after returning from the island. Against the continued threats from the usual suspects, Mallory wants to return to the fun she and the main character had the first time they met: Outdoors with no labels on their relationship.
Needless to say, Mallory is well aware of Jaye’s bungalow adventure with the main character, so she knows the bar has been set pretty high. Will she be up to the challenge?
Meanwhile, Jaye is wrestling with the specter of her medical school dreams evaporating, and all of this while the pressure is still on from their government and corporate enemies to nip the threat posed by Mallory’s existence in the bud.
We will see some new faces as well as revisit a few from earlier chapters as events converge on a trajectory that, unsurprisingly, ends where it began.
There are changes beyond the content addition. You’ll notice a new main menu with updates to dated animation, and improvements throughout the UI.
Additionally, Kent added his first animations to replace the slideshow lewd psuedo-animations scenes in the Prologue and Ch1.
Where do we go from here? Chasing Sunsets moved on from Early Access on purchase platforms today. While we will add one more content update, and modernize the oldest parts, our focus will begin moving toward our next project, Firebreak.
We hope you enjoy Chapter 9 as much as we enjoyed making it. We hope you laugh a little, maybe get a little bit of the feels, and, of course, enjoy our ladies doing what they do best.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us on this project. We couldn’t do it without you, and we hope what we do next only raises the bar.
v0.9
1900 new individual static renders
6 new animations
1 Crossover
22 new original audio tracks
21 new achievements
