400k View/100k Download Hype + Mid February Dev Log

Hello everyone! I hope you all have been enjoying the v0.3.1 release of A Fortnight at Frenni Fazclaire's! We've hit several new milestones with this release, including over 400k views and 100k downloads as of this blog post. As sort of a look back and look ahead, I wanted to put out a bit of a dev log regarding how the project is faring, some interesting analytics, and what's next for the project.

To start, the F@FF project has been consistently ahead of the [ROADMAP] projections. That's due to an amazing team of composers, artists, and translators who go the extra mile to help me bring my vision to your screens. However, that may change with the v0.4.0 release. Here's why:

Every update thus far has included chunks of narrative content as follows:

- v0.1.0 had Night 1, Day 1, Night 2, Day 2, and Night 3

- v0.2.0 had Day 3, Night 4, Day 4, Night 5, Day 5, and Night 6

- v0.3.0 had Day 6, Night 7, Day 7, Night 8, Day 8, and Night 9

v0.4.0 will include content for Day 9, Night 10, Day 10, Night 11, Day 11, Night 12, Day 12, Night 13, Day 13, Night 14, and then the Epilogue. That means we're going from an average of 6 chunks of material per update to nearly double that in the next release. 

While the core art (character sprites, backgrounds, music, etc.) is largely in place, the bulk of the art for v0.4.0 will focus on over 13 new CGs including 9 H-Scenes. CGs typically take the longest amount of time to polish, not to mention the effort our animator has to put in to make that magic happen.

There's also the matter of translations to consider. On average it's taken the translation teams 2-3 months after I finish the script to do their work. Again, with such a large update ahead of us, that time could easily double, if not triple. 

That's why I want to set the expectation now that a release of v0.4.0 prior to Q4 2024 is highly unlikely. It is possible we may once again beat our own estimates and release early, but I don't want people to be left wondering where the update is. To that end, I will continue doing regular dev logs like this one, as well as keeping folks up to date on Discord. I know folks may not want to support via Patreon from now until Q4 2024 with such a gap in content, but just know that every dollar you contribute is going back into our projects to make them the best they can be! You're always welcome in the community even if you have to drop down to a free user.

Now for some fun stats:

- Over half of the player base is playing the Android version. The rough breakdown is 50% Android, 45% PC/Linux, and 5% Mac

- The highest amount of views per day was 12,079 on February 15th, the day after v0.3.1 was released to the public

- Similarly, the highest amount of downloads per day was 3,374 on February 15th

- Over 183 ratings have been left on the Itch.io page, leading to a combined rating of 4.7/5

- The Discord has over 1,460 members somehow. Where did you all come from?!

- Lexy the Shark has the most fan art so far, largely thanks to a certain Tier 6 Patron