June 2022 Update!

Hey everyone!

So I know I don't update very frequently, but there has been some interesting news in the past few weeks! I wanted to thank everyone again for their continued support and let you know how things are going.

First off, a direct announcement about the game. While I started off using RPGMaker to get the ball rolling, I've started running into numerous frustrations with the limitations of the engine. That and I've realized that the game is very dialog-heavy. It's because I like writing dialog! The story and the conversations between characters are some of my favorite parts of the game to work on. That combined with the fact that a lot of the feedback I have received from you lovely folks about the inability to skip forward in conversations, and RPGMaker save files being a gigantic pain to move to new versions, I started looking into alternatives in order to make things better for everyone.

And where I've landed is Ren'py. Most of my work on the game these past few months has been in porting the game into the ren'py visual novel engine. There's *way* more dialog than I even properly remembered, but it has been a lot of fun re-visiting the 'Chapter 1' content in a new environment, and I think having the game in ren'py will definitely make for a better experience in the long run. (It also means that Android users will be able to play the game via joiplay, saves will carry over when new updates release, and if you want to re-play sequences of the game, you can use the built-in 'fast forward' function to skip over dialog you've already seen! There's a reason why so many other visual novels use ren'py...)

Now for the other news. A bit of a mixed happy/sad news: a while back I contacted the wonderfully talented growth artist Sihagen about a potential commission. To my delight, they agreed! But the bad news is they contacted me last week saying they would not be able to complete the commission. But the good news is that they sent over what they had finished, and what they've made is great! That's the art that's linked with this post there. So that will be going into the ren'py version of the game for the time being.

One of the main reasons I haven't been very forthcoming with news about the ren'py version of the game is because ren'py doesn't provide any visual aides the way that RPGM does, so I was hesitant to share this out without any good visuals to go along with it. But now that I have these, I'll be able to really get moving on things. Additionally: I have contacted another GTS character artist to continue getting more and better art assets for the game. As I've said before, all the money that is being contributed to this patreon is getting turned right around into art commissions to support the story, and that will continue to be the case. You folks have been very generous and patient with me as I keep chipping away at things, so I'm happy to be able to show you some of the results of your contributions!

Again, thank you all for your continued support. I will post the next release as soon as I'm comfortable with what I have there, so that we can hopefully move swiftly on to New Content! I've been aching to tell the next parts of the story, so look forward to that coming soon!

Much love, everyone. Be good to one another.
- T