Hi everyone!  Thanks for you patience with our small gap in monthly updates. I'm back in business with the current state of the project and team.

State of John's Route

So chronic illnesses can be very frustrating, and this winter and early spring I ended up struggling a ton with mine. I'd been doing well in the fall, but I relapsed hard in Feb-Apr. The good news is that after three years I finally found a specialist who was willing to try medications on me, and the most common med being used on long Covid kicked in during late April after just a couple months! (It can take 3-4 months to fully feel the effects.)  For the first time since January 2022, I feel... normal. It's very exciting!

On top of the illness struggles, I was having difficulties with the way I'd planned the relationship development in John's route. It just wasn't working for me. After a lot of scribbled notes and cursing, it was a conversation with my first reader that helped me figure out my issue... I needed John to be more flawed and for the main pre-relationship confusion to be two-sided instead of one-sided. This avoids a formerly pivotal scene that I felt was too cliche and replaces it with some lovely angst and flailing. Having figured that out, I'm much happier with where things are going.

This leans into my route theme where Marion and John have a number of things in common as the "responsible one" in their families. Both of them are very hard on themselves and that can lead one to not realize that somebody else might actually be super into you. ;)

So never fear, production has been slow so far but in my new brain fogless state I'll be banging this sucker out over the summer and a fall release should be possible!  Wasn't able to speed up the production rate quite yet, but it will be out.

Team Status

While I'm doing the writing and coding, the rest of the team is on their usual tasks.

Sandra: As we've basically finished the backgrounds (I'm trying very hard not to need anymore!), Sandra has moved to assisting Lawri with cut-in production. Here's one that I particularly like from John's route. What did Roan do to deserve being scooped? It involved shenanigans. I gave Sandra reference pictures of angry cats being held. :D

Arrapso: Only one major NPC sprite left to do, so Arrapso is mostly on CGs now. She'll also be doing a more naked version of our male-identified love interest sprites so that they're not obviously wearing trousers during scenes where they're implied to be naked. They won't have visible genitals, you'll just see their lower bellies and maybe some nice muscular lines down there.

Lawrichai: With Sandra helping on cut-ins, Lawri is able to concentrate fully on the animated lore intro. She learned Live2D over the winter so she could take over the animation duties herself, making for a smoother experience than me using in-engine animation tools.

That's where we are, and I hope to be able to deliver much swifter production updates over the summer!