a dev log and an art poll

Hello beautiful people! I hope you are all doing well and making it through the longest, hardest months of the year. I'm terribly tempted to wail on about how thankful I am that you are so generous with your patience, but I am fairly sure that you are more interested in how the progress is coming along! (nevertheless, thankyouthankyouthankyou!!! I could kiss you!) Let me tell you that writing is coming along great; I've passed 320k in the first draft (!!) and working on just getting the first draft finished has been reducing my anxiety so, so much. I've never been one to follow an outline (for the measly small projects I have finished before) and it really shows, haha. Getting to word-vomit out exactly how the story is panning out without worrying about language or grammar is so freeing, and I wish I would have just done this from the start. Yes, it will need a lot of editing, but it would have needed it anyway. The downside, though, is that it is dull to read and sloppily written. Have a look:

(and this is one of the better parts... It's a mess in there, but a beautiful mess. All ro pronouns are he/hims--I just picked it for ease of writing.)

I am currently trying to switch over to finishing the demo, but it stalls my writing to a worrying degree. Getting better at task-switching is something I'm working on! Still not decided on if I should just keep writing until I'm finished or if I should bite the bullet and just finish the demo. Doing both at the same time is too time-consuming and overwhelming while I'm also battling off some really nasty mental health-issues. I'm just taking it one day at a time right now.

But! Great news everybody!!!

 I've finally, finally found an artist who is going to do all the illustrations of the characters codex and selection screens! It turned out pretty expensive (for full transparency, $135 per character for just the lineart, but I can afford to do two commissions a month and still survive!)
Who do you want to go first?  

I'm so excited :> yay

A note for Idren and Ida: I don't want Ida to have booby armor-- they are going to be unisex. So for theirs it will be one in armor, and one in mist shape. What do you think of this?
I'm also not including Leith, because I will show them once it is safe to show their new shapes. >:3