Weekly Update | August 3rd, 2025

Brothers and Sisters and Siblings of the Lucent Priory,

We're so back.

Earlier this week, Canticle finally got indexed on itch.io again. (Funnily enough, it took them longer to index the safe version than it did to re-index the NSFW version after I removed the donation option). As it is, both Canticle versions are free and don't take donations on itch.io so your patronage here is all the more appreciated. And most importantly, people can find us again!

To give you an idea of what this month-long de-indexing (which, those of you who've been around for a while will remember, started even before the NSFW crackdown), here is a snapshot of Canticle analytics for the past month:

Anyways, hopefully that's the end of that particular saga, and we can look forward to better things ahead. I'd like to thank all of you who went out there and helped advertise the game to your friends and other Discord servers, and who left ratings and comments on the game page to help with outreach and the itch.io algorithm. You're all the best bunch of medieval monks a prior could ask for.

Here's what I did this week:

• Scrambled to get Canticle: Safe Version up on itch.io after the crackdown. It didn't really end up being that effective, given that the NSFW version got indexed before it did, but I am leaving it up for future emergencies. You never know with the way global politics are changing.

• Thanks to my Cantors who are currently testing out version 0.277, I was able to fix a bunch of bugs present in the "first dates" included in that update.

• I released an expansion to the free demo on itch.io allowing free users to try out the first day (Mountainsday) of Chapter 2. This led me to a reckoning I had been putting off for some time, detailed in the next bulletin.

• When I started developing this game, I knew absolutely nothing about game dev. That was 7 months ago now. I made really amateurish decisions when it came to optimizing both code and graphics. Since itch.io has a 1GB limit to the size of the game you are uploading, I had to figure out ways to cut the size now that I was adding another day to the free demo. Luckily, I had learned better ways to deal with graphical assets some time ago; I just needed to go back and do the work of actually editing those images. That's been done now and those edits have been applied to the Patreon version of the game as well.

• Earlier today, I made the first Android version of the free demo for the game. That required some research and modification, and it is still a very rough draft. For those of you with Android devices who would be interested in helping me QA this version, please download it here and test it out. Your feedback would be a great help.

• Regarding further story development, that was slower this week because of all the other stuff I was dealing with. Even so, I was able to plan out 3 important scenes that are coming up in the story (and, since from now on, everything I say here could be a spoiler, I'm going to be very vague about it). I prepared the art assets for those three scenes, animated one of them, and started writing one of them (probably around 30-40% through now).

What I'm planning to do next week:

• Get Patreon version 0.277 ("First Dates") ready and updated for the release for patrons in the Scribe tier on August 10th. Thanks to my Cantors, hopefully they will have a smooth, bug-free experience.

• Now that the itch.io kerfuffle has been dealt with, plough ahead with new content! I'm honestly hoping to get all the three scenes I wrote about earlier written and animated next week, which might be kind of ambitious, but I'd like to make sure to have the next big update ready by the end of August, and for that update to close out Chapter 2.

To all patrons in the Cantor tier, if you've played through the new update, please let me know about any bugs or inconsistencies you saw in our Discord (please do not comment here for spoiler reasons!) or in Patreon DMs. Also, there is a poll out in the #cantorium channel on Discord about which date was your favorite, so cast your vote there because I'm dying to know.

Have a nice a sunny Elythean week if you're on the north hemisphere, or a cooler Saheilan one if you're on the south!