Proof of Life #243: Last PoL before the next update! (hopefully)

Hello, hello people, how are you doing in this fine morning/afternoon/evening? Good? That's awesome! Bad? I hope to provide some distraction with this PoL, as well as something to look forward to!

So, you've seen the title, you know what I'm going to say. The main content of the update is done and (almost) fully tested, save for part of the last extra scene. There's still a bunch of things left to do: add the scenes to the reminiscence room, update the walkthrough, add the freeroams (3 in total, 2 for Cyanna and 1 for Rose because Cyanna is far behind in amount of freeroams) and a new triple trident opponent, among other things, but I'm fairly confident I'll have it all done by the end of the week.

There's just one issue: I'm fairly behind on commissions. One artist, who's been my main artist so far, has been piling up delays after delays lately, and I haven't heard anything from him since I gave him a small commission he told me he'd finish by Tuesday last week. As you can expect, that kind of threw a wrench in my plans and schedule. I've tried to rely on two other artists to help me fill in the gaps, but they've also got their own schedule. Hopefully, they'll manage to finish all the custom sprites I still need for this update by the weekend.

I'm also pretty certain there won't be new full-size portraits in this update. I'm having a hard time getting the artist to answer my emails, let alone give me a rough ETA on the portraits' completion. All I know is he can't work on it right now. As much as I love his art, I'm contemplating hiring someone else for the next games, because working with reliable people is paramount in this line of work. I can tolerate delays, we're all humans, but being kept in the dark or outright ignored is something I have a hard time dealing with.

Anyway, you're not here to hear my rant. I just wanted to give you an update on the state of things and how uncertain things still were for update 16.

You might also be wondering what's the illustration for this PoL. To keep it spoiler-free, this one is directly associated with the story part of the update. Pretty heavy stuff. Someone's past.

Anyway, sorry for the bitter-sweet PoL. Some good news, some bad, that's how life goes. I hope (I really do) to see you again before the next PoL for the actual release of Update 16!

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful week!

N_Taii

PS: I finally have my own home, which allows me to work a lot more efficiently than before, so there's that at least^^