December Dev Update #1 (Patreon)

A little later than I was hoping for with this dev update. ^^" It's been a pretty wild month so far and with the upcoming holiday season just around the corner, it'll only get more busy.

I'll keep things short and sweet, direct to the point! Starting off, we've been getting some of the gui assets put together and finely tweaking them here recently. Our first thing being the textbox dialogue/monologue text itself.

What we've been wanting to do with this update is a few things with the textbox ui. Since we've updated the game in full HD 1920x1080 quality, it brought with it some awkward running off of the text with our old ui from v0.19.5 and even with the new textbox ui. We had to go through and make sure the text through the game wasn't too long or running off the screen awkwardly like it does in v0.19.5.

With that fixed and sorted out, our next aspect to fix up was the text itself. The font has been updated to be a bit more neutral and easier in general to read by itself. We also had to play around with the color scheme, originally going with a white and black setup.. Which didn't quite fit the theme for MA, but we had some issues trying to get the text to feel readable enough.

After a bit of back and forth, we managed to come to this solution above! White text with a darker purple tone, increased some other settings to make it feel better when reading the text on the new ui. We'll be taking feedback on this for the next few updates leading into 2023 and adjusting things accordingly. ^^

(The name text "Joey" for example, is in the middle of being adjusted still for v0.20)

Another thing we managed to get done for the new ui, is the addition of the "Notice" popup window that'll be displayed when trying to exit the game or returning back to the main menu. There's a few other cases for when this popup window will show itself. 

We'll be taking feedback on how this feels during the next few updates as well, adjusting it as needed along the way if there's situations for it that end up being too annoying.

Besides the ui additions and fixes shared, we've went through and made some adjustments to earlier episodes to replace music in areas with new tracks, adjust some and apply some fixes to bugs, very light quality fixes, etc. (For example, Episode 4 now displays Lola in her full cosplay outfit, wig and eye contacts fully. Where currently she isn't displayed like that.)

Episode 5 content itself is coming along and we expect to have a decent preview after Christmas to show off some more content from the new episode in video format, similar to earlier this month. We're trying to be mindful not to share major spoiler moments of the episode, but we do want to share with everyone how things are looking visually as we get closer to having v0.20 ready.

Again, thank you for those being super patient with us. <3 We'll try to keep everyone fully updated step by step as we move along.

~Team Work~

I've heard the first preview for the next track being worked on by ComposerJF and I'm very hopeful with how it's coming along! I can't say for sure if we'll hear the finished preview of that until January though.

Much of this month has been a bit slow on the art side of things due to the holidays, but much of that is being felt across the whole team as we're all really busy trying to get things done related to the project and our own personal affairs to sort out.

We hope that everyone has enjoyed the sprite additions shared earlier this month that feature Erika, Miki and Zoey's outfit additions. Along with that, the cg art featuring Erika shared as well!

I know that Lisa is taking advantage of the time off for this month and will start up in 2023 with the remaining KS oc's we have in mind. MarxeDP and AjoseMp are currently working on some minor stuff this month. We hope to share some previews of that here in January possibly.

We also have a big sprite related post to tackle sometime in January. We've been holding off on sharing that one until v0.20 is released and give everyone some time to check that content out before we announce a interesting post and collect some feedback as we move along into future content with it.

~Closing Statements~

We're trying to get the most we can done even during the busy holiday season and regardless of personal plans among the team. 

We know this year has been really awkward in our development and things didn't pan out as expected along the way. So we understand that many are rightfully are looking for results and we know it isn't enough, but we hope the start with what we're doing this month to show visuals of our work is a step in the right direction.

It'll take time for us to earn the trust and respect from many of those who might've lost faith in our development, but that's going to be our motto for moving into 2023. We want to improve greatly in sharing our development process along the way behind the scenes leading up to each release and what exactly goes into the entire progress from start to finish with each release.

We have much work ahead of us. We can't fix our past mistakes, but we can learn and improve from those mistakes moving forward is our goal.

Thank you everyone and have a very safe, Happy Holiday season! <3