Update 10/23

Aha! It may be 4:15am in my timezone, but it's still Friday somewhere! If you've been wondering what the heck Toro's been doing all this time: Behold! Well, behold a piece of it at least!

We've always billed Aria as having an extensive cast of characters, and I hope this gives a better idea of what we mean. Compared to Forks, Toro's really been able to stretch his creativity, and you'll be seeing all of these characters in more depth once their introductions resume when the first demo releases. Actually, a few additional characters have been included as the demo's expanded and been rewritten, so I should talk with Toro about formally introducing them starting next week.

Most of these characters also have transformation sequences, of which Toro and I have worked through 4. Progress is slower on them as we treat each step as its own individual piece and organically expand on it. This differs from Forks, where we started with each character's thinnest stage, then drew the fattest, then simply filled in the gap with as many extra stages as we wanted.

You've seen most of Rena's sequence already, so you have an idea of how Toro and I are taking the TF theme. The other 3 are previewed in the above images, can any eagle-eyed readers with some long memories recognize them?

Lastly, before I keel over from exhaustion, I'd like to add a silver lining to the demo's extended due date. Thanks to longer dev time, Toro's been able to continuously iterate on character designs, and when the design works for the better, we update it. As you can see in the third image, Zoe's had some welcome detail added.

Whew, Forks and Aria updated in the same week! That's the way it should always be! See you next week, if not with the demo then for sure a character introduction!