Progress Update Rambling

Hello there!

This post contains spoilers for the upcoming update.
So, I've been working on the new update. The Saturnalia chapter starts off with a ritual and a sacrifice to Saturn. Hati and the gang take part but the group’s conflicts make it harder to focus on the ceremony. Camilla is blaming Tinsae and Hati for something she refuses to elaborate on, Niall is ready to throw hands at Marcus, and Quinn is being an overall nuisance, sniffing the air for Hati and blurting out plot relevant details when the mood suits them.

I’d say it’s a good prelude for the evening’s costume party.

Funnily enough, there's a version of Niall who doesn’t know about Hati’s identity and is blissfully ignorant about everything. That is the only Niall not wanting to throw hands at Marcus at the moment. Sure, he’s still worried about Hati because Marcus is clearly up to no good and is still endangering Hati’s life by being so careless about his apparent favoritism that could lead to rumors. However, he still doesn’t know the extent of things.

And this is the chapter where Camilla’s mask starts to crack, so that’s exciting for her. Things start to reveal about her and she’s not happy about that.

This chapter actually changed quite a lot, there was supposed to be a whole wrestling match because that’s historically something that legionaries and auxiliaries did during winter months when the soldiers were bored out of their minds. One such match ended up in a full blown fight between legionaries and auxiliaries. It would’ve been fun to have something like that but I realized that it would just take up space and not really amount to anything plot-wise, not even character-wise because everything that would’ve happened there could just as well happen in another scene, or has already happened. So, I cut it. Another big chapter, poof, gone (alongside with the horse race one). I will post some bloopers from those scenes that I had already written, it was one of my core chapters I was sure would happen. Alas, need to be flexible and realize when something is just a dead weight.

Apart from the Saturnalia drama, I’ve been working to make the UI look better. Finally, I’m quite happy with the look, HTML tried to beat me up but couldn't (it did beat me up for several nights when I stared at it with my eyes dry but in the end, I rose to victory). The new update will be uploaded with that UI yay. It's nothing fancy though (or too distracting or overly designed), just new title/chapter fonts and pics and links and colors.

But yeah, everything is going well enough. I’ve been squinting at the earlier chapters, itching to start to edit them in a way that suits the new chapters better. (Like the personality stats and making better sense of the different relationship routes.) However, I think it would take so much of my time that I will still solely focus on continuing to push out new scenes and chapters. I know my writing and the handling of coding has improved and I would like to put that knowledge into the public demo but the demo has been there like that for a couple of years, might as well be a few months more. There will be, for example, more information about Hati’s family and their past life in the form of flashbacks but I’ve been debating on when to start writing those, because they will need to be added into the earlier chapters.

Anyway, just something I’ve been pondering. For now, better to focus on the RO routes and the main plot. Everything else can be added later when I start to edit. The main thing is to get to the 9 - 10th chapter and start to worry about editing then.

So, that’s one big ramble, that's enough for now haha. Anyway, thank you so so much for being here, I really appreciate your support. Thank you, and I will do my absolute best to push out the update this month.