Happy New Year everyone! I really wanted to get Bonding, Now ready by Valentines Day... alas, things usually take longer than one originally assumes. Let's start this devlog with some updates.

From good news: Story #4, featuring Nabi and Eclipse, is now completed! This is quite the important milestone as finishing up this story was my number one requirement for release. This means the game is really close to a releasable state!

With this, the game now has 3 fully complete stories:

• Story #1 - the one available in the demo; three friends going on a martial arts camp together. This one features Leia as the main love interest.
  
• Story #2 - two people wake up in a room with no doors or windows. Featuring a the troublesome character of Gretta (not present in Story #5).
  
• Story #4 - a long weekend of a group of four friends, embarking on a fantasy pen-and-paper adventure... and more. The latest addition and I think so far the longest short-story of them all. Features Nabi and Eclipse.

Before release what I still need to do is testing and tweaking. This might feel quick and easy, but I already noticed while working on the demo: there's so much tweaking needed, really. We need to remember that the content in Story #1 and #2 is already around 2 years old. Getting back to them after such a long time, I frequently see dialogue and/or scenes that need rewriting or rearranging. But it's good. Such 'baking time' just adds quality.


So when will the actual release happen? Besides testing, I wanted to add a bit more content to the ever-going Story #5, but not too much more. There's also some 'help' text that I'd like to prepare for each story, but that shouldn't take too long. I think all of this is achievable in around a months time. So I'd say 1-2 months more and it's out!
Around that time I'd like to spend more time on social media advertisement: go out and spread the word of Bonding, Now a bit.

Would love to get a basic achievement system working before release. But I won't block on that; this can come with the next update as well.

This reminds me: I recently created media profiles on both Bluesky and Mastodon. I'm a bit on the geeky side, and I don't really like or use X/Twitter. You can find those here:

• https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@zenco
  
• https://bsky.app/profile/zencogames.bsky.social

I'll be posting some less-official updates there. And a bit more frequently too.


But at least I think I have all the drawing content finalized, for now. I'd like to use the occasion to address the elephant in the room (and I will multiple times in the future): I really can't draw too well. I love drawing, don't get me wrong, but to get any more involved scene drawn, I need sooo many references. Seriously, SOOO many references. If you a scene and feel it looks familiar to you, there are high chances that maybe you saw a photo somewhere already that I used while working on it. I try to ask my partner to help me, and we sometimes photograph each-other to get reference angles/poses. But there's stock references from all over the world as well.

What can you do. Maybe one day I get good enough not to need all of this. You are all witnessing skill evolution first-hand here..!

Holiday season is right around the corner, making it a perfect occasion for a project status report. For this update I would like to mainly address two points: the release date and early access.

Work on the game is progressing nicely. though a bit slower than I'd like. That is sadly the problem when working on something as an after-regular-work project. Especially that there was a lot of chaos, deadlines and crunch at work, so it was even harder to find time for drawing, coding or writing for my game. But even though I'm all worn out after work, I try to spend at least a little bit of time for Bonding, Now every day. Sometimes affecting my personal well-being, but as long as my partner doesn't make complain, it's FINE!
Because of this, however, I'm afraid I will not make it in time to release in 2024... It's a shame, since I really hoped I could go live around the holiday season. But I also don't want to rush it. I need time to not only finish the planned content, but also make sure all included stories are as much bug-free as possible.


This brings me to my second topic for today: early access.

Not sure if I mentioned it, but even though the game will not be "complete" on release day, I do not want to mark Bonding, Now as early access. The main reason is: Bonding, Now is supposed to be a living project for most of its runtime. This is the power that the 'stories' split gives. The game will launch with a few ready stories to play through, some being work-in-progress and some entirely missing. I want to keep adding more as time goes, trying out new ideas, new mechanics, adding new characters. In my eyes early access doesn't fit here, since then I'd need to keep it labelled as such for years. And what would it mean to be out of early access?
Of course there are also other reasons. Like, as a small creator, using early access removes some Steam visibility.
So please be mindful of this once the game finally goes live. Release day is only the beginning...! I intend to keep adding content for years to come.

Also: I enjoyed drawing this small comic strip for this post. I might make more of them!


In the last weeks I was finally able to finish the whole 'Day 1' of Story #5, the more open-ended one. This is a big milestone, as the first in-game day in such simulations is always a bit of an extended tutorial. All the subsequent days will be a bit less time consuming to do (I hope). I also finally got back to working on the final scenes of Story #4. This is the first story where I am experimenting with some animated scenes. Nothing too special, but if people like it, I might consider making more scenes with moving parts. The biggest potential is of course for sex scenes! Minus is, of course, that those take longer to draw. But we'll see how it goes.

Once Story #4 is done, I will of course continue working on the next days of Story #5, but I do have a few other stories lined up. Theme wise those will be: a spooky horror-ish story, a gender-swap story,
a nudist story... I'll think about which one to do first, and if I should do that, or maybe finally spend some time on Story #3.

So much to do, so little time. Happy (soon to come) holidays everyone!