January 2025 Progress Report

Hey guys!

Dev here.

First, I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year. I hope the new year will treat everyone with kindness!

Sorry, no build at this time once again, but with this absolutely gigantic Homecoming update finally shipped and out of the way a few days ago, we can finally fully go back to work on Santa Lucia. Can you believe I made more than 20 sprites in two months, from September to November? That was a big reason why the progress on SL halted for a while. We also had to do a lot of work in other parts of the game, but we’re finally home free now… and into the arms of another huge workload, haha.

Still, we didn’t want to leave you guys with nothing, so you’ll find on this post a few examples of stuff I’ve been working on, namely, redoing very old sprites. Dubois and Diego are both getting completely revamped sprites, alongside Shay and Candace by the time the next update rolls around.

But… that’s not all! As a New Year gift, I’ve prepared a whole new side story for everyone to enjoy. Usually. We’d give it to higher tier patrons to read first, but as an apology for the very long wait, we’re distributing it for free for everyone to read through. This side story is actually pretty spicy and contains a brand-new CG I made just for it. It’s actually kinda elaborate, and I couldn’t cram all the variants in the document without inflating its size massively. As such, you guys will be able to see every little detail when we put the new side story in the game for the next update. We’re also packaging a few versions of the CGs in a .zip file, for… personal enjoyment, let’s say.

I hope you guys will like it, and we’ll see you at the end of the month for the next Santa Lucia update. It’s gonna be a big one.

Cheers,

Dev

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Happy new years, everyone!

Like Dev already stated, we don’t have a build prepared for today. We all spent a lot more time and effort than anticipated getting the latest Homecoming build prepared. You’ve also probably noticed by now how much I’ve been struggling the last half year or so to output content. It took some time to admit it to myself, but I’ve been burnt out pretty bad and it’s hard to recover from that when you won’t acknowledge it.

But it’s a new year, which means it’s time to turn a new leaf. I intend to do better this year. Dev and I agreed that we’re aiming for an SL build drop in the middle of this month, most likely around the 20th. For the time being I’m going to shelve the side projects I’ve been wanting to get off the ground (GOAL, The Book of Annwyn) and focus instead on pushing Santa Lucia towards the finish line quicker. In an ideal world, I can see us being most of the way done with Act 4 by this time next year with only a build or two left before the game concludes. I’m not foolish enough to guarantee this outcome, but that is what I hope to accomplish for 2025.

In the meantime, Dev has maintained his own personal spark of inspiration and channeled it into this short story/CG combo we’re presenting today. We’re extremely happy with how it turned out! It’s another chapter told from Russell’s point of view, much like the short story “Punching Bag” that’s already in the game. We plan to have this short story coded into the main game by next build drop as well, but for now you guys can enjoy what we have ahead of time.

See you guys later this month!

~Dzahn