Hello, everyone!

Thank you again for all your support! Sorry for the brief bit of radio silence after the campaign. I, uh, sort of woke up having a panic attack yesterday and had to go to urgent care to make sure it wasn't anything serious. I'm all right though!! This also happened to me just before Petal Crash came out.

I thought now would be a good time to let everyone know what our plans for development are, as well as the timeline for the fulfillment of rewards!

We plan on going with an Early Access model, where major chunks of game content are released in major updates.

Our first focus, and the one that this crowdfund has guaranteed, is to get the game to Early Access in the first place. For that, the game is going to need, at minimum:

We'll also be seeing about getting in Libbie, Baz, and the two guest characters during this phase, but they might be saved for a minor update later. Backstage Pass backers will get to play an incomplete version of the game, but Early Access will mark the point the game goes up for sale publicly.

I don't want to give a specific timeline, because I'm ALWAYS wrong when I try to, but I expect that we'll have the game in this state probably somewhere around the end of the year.

After the Early Access release, our focus for the next major updates will be the original Story Mode and Online, with rollback and lobbies and such. Both Jill and I will be working on these, of course, but my focus will be primarily on the Story mode (which mostly involves lots of new assets) while Jill's focus will be on online play (which mostly involves lots of new code).

Each of these will be the focus of a major update. We may publicly release either of these in an incomplete state ahead of time, as well - like one or two stories in the Story Mode, or functional Online play without the full lobby system implemented. Backstage Pass backers will definitely get to try all of these in their in-development forms.

Once both the Story Mode and Online Play are completely finished, all of our development effort will go into the expansive new Adventure Mode. A lot of stuff about the Adventure Mode is still up in the air design-wise, so it's going to involve a lot of rapid prototyping and experimentation to make sure it's fun. The Backstage Pass backers will get access to all of the sloppy in-between states the Adventure Mode is going to be in during development - the completion of the Adventure Mode will mark v1.0 of the game and the end of Early Access.

Once the game has reached v1.0, then we'll be able to turn our attention to the feasibility of console ports. We're fairly confident we'll be able to make them happen, but we probably won't doing a simultaneous v1.0 release between the PC and console versions. We're going to do our best to see if we can get online play cross-platform between PC and console as well, but no promises!

All of you who pledged to the campaign - thank you so much! You're probably wondering when you'll see your rewards, so here's the plan!

I'm going to get started ordering and shipping the physical merch as soon as I have access to the funds! The survey will be going out in a few weeks - it's at that point you'll pay for shipping costs and enter your address and such. I anticipate people will be receiving their physical rewards in a month or two.

Anyone who backed the game will get a game key once the game is in public Early Access. Extra game keys will be handed out as well!

We'll be making a Backstage server on Discord soon, and probably be sending out invite links along with the survey that everyone gets! The backstage access to the game itself will probably be done through Steam's beta testing system. I expect we'll probably have something ready for the backstage folks to play within a few months.

We'll probably be implementing the in-game cosmetic rewards around when Online becomes available - we expect to implement some kind of unlock method that's verified by the server so that just anyone can't play online with exclusive skins just by editing their save or whatever. We might implement a way for people to unlock them locally before then, too.

We'll have the credits implemented in-game once the Story mode becomes playable. When the survey goes out, those who backed for a credit will be able to enter how they'd like to be credited. The custom Petal Crash 1 & 2 style sprites in the credits are going to be the lowest priority thing for development - I can't imagine everyone wants to wait longer for the game itself to be finished while I spend months animating more than 50 backer sprites! My current plan is to get a still frame for everyone done first, and then get to animating them over time. I hope I can have everyone's sprites done and animated by the time we hit v1.0, but I'll definitely have the still frames done at least! If you got a custom credit sprite, the survey will include a field that lets you know the best way for me to get in touch with you to work that out.

If anyone has any questions about our plans for development, don't hesitate to ask! Thank you all again - I don't know about everyone else, but I'm feeling unstoppable!