Greetings everyone! With Episode 1 in the rearview mirror, we want to take this opportunity to look ahead at the future of Hazelnut Latte. 

This is the first of a six-part series in which we will discuss the future of Hazelnut Latte. What is changing, and how we will release the game.

In this post, we will go over the new Episode Count and what a Word Count is.

How Many Episodes?

Our previous estimate was 23-25 Episodes, but this is now changing. We spent a lot of time restructuring the story and rethinking the game and what we want to do with it.

Hazelnut Latte will now be 17 Episodes.

As many of you know from the end of Episode 1, Jeze was reintroduced as Jamie. This is because his story is being dramatically changed. Because of this change, the rest of the narrative needs to shift. Not only that, but we also want to rearrange other points to improve flow.

For those who remember, back in our Ren'Py era, at the end of Episode 5, you were cut free from the linear shackles and jumped into the open world of Jade City. That moment at the end of Episode 5 was quite dramatic and set the stage for the rest of the game. Now, that climactic Mr. Noto moment will occur in Episode 4 rather than Episode 5. Meaning that Episode 5 will now be the start of hands-off free roam. We wanted to get to free roam ASAP, but we also knew that we needed time to set up a proper story in Act 1.

Originally, you had 17 to 20 Episodes to save the Cafe from Mr. Noto's clutches. Now, you will only have 12 Episodes to do this. We believe that this will heighten the stakes. I was worried that with so much time, the stakes wouldn't feel threatening, and that it would give you, the player, a lot of time to find a way to defeat Mr. Noto.

12 Episodes of Free Roam means that you will be more limited, but everything will be more impactful. I was also worried that, with so much time, the characters would be hanging around for episodes, waiting for something to happen. Now, every episode, big and important stuff will go down, and relationships will deepen.

Story Amount & Word Count

While this may seem like you are losing a lot in cutting 8 whole episodes, much of it is actually just being restructured. 

I'd like to discuss Word Count and why it is a metric I love to use. When you buy a book, you may judge the length of the book by how many pages or how many chapters it has. These things actually do not matter. A book might be released in hardcover at 800 pages, then turn around and release a smaller 600-page paperback. Word Count, however, never changes. This is why I use it as a unit of measurement, because no matter what, the number of words won't change.

So let's compare Episodes 1 and 2 from their Ren'Py era with the current versions.

Episode 1

Ren'Py: 7,678 words

Unity: 37,997 words

Episode 2

Ren'Py: 19,630 words

Unity: 60k+ words

As you can see, the new Episode 1 is now almost 5 times larger than the old one. The new Episode 2 is 2.8x bigger, which means that at just the end of Episode 2, we are going to be over half of the amount of content we had in Episode 6 of the old Ren'Py era.

For those of you who are curious, the word count of the entire Ren'Py Era Episodes 1-6 was 143,908 words.

So when I say that we are losing episodes, we are just making bigger, more impactful episodes. It would also not surprise me if 60k words is the baseline for episodes going forward, since Episode 1 was a setup episode.

Wrap up

It was a long journey to get here, but we believe it is the right one. If we want to put everything into this game, we'd never make another one. We knew if left unchecked, we would let this game spiral out of control.

This was originally part of an even longer post, but I decided to split the topics up into their own posts, so stay tuned, because tomorrow we are going to discuss Scope Creep!

Don't forget to join us for our YouTube Live Stream on Wednesday, August 12th, at 9 AM Pacific Time, where we will hold a large Q&A about all this information!

https://youtube.com/live/orTdqwcfGeo 

If you are not available to attend, but still want to submit a question (or want to be nice and give us time to prepare), you can fill out this Google Form with your questions so we can read them during the livestream.

https://forms.gle/AcV949jK2GAwwMP78

Thank you all so much for your continued support! You're the reason we're even making this game. With that said, Stay Rad!