SweetCanvas Update [2023] (Patreon)

This will be mostly a compilation of everything since the end of the Kickstarter campaign and is mainly for anyone new, so if you've been here for a while then there's not going to be too much here besides character descriptions and some other miscellaneous things that will be new to you.

Also, if you're interested in joining in on the community you can join the SweetCanvas Discord if you haven't already! 

With that said, let's get started!

CHARACTER SPRITES

• Kana

All of her current alternate sprites (in her school uniform) are ready for final rendering! She also has an additional outfit completed for her base sprite!

• Peal

Peal has two of her planned alternate sprites now, with one of them ready for render.

• Alys

Alys has two rendered sprites, one that's a work in progress and a bunch of outfits for her base sprite in varying levels of completion!

• Io

Io also has many, MANY outfits in various levels of completion across all four of her current sprites. I would have included more, but her file is a ridiculously large size so lining them up takes annoyingly long. I've shown a few others in previous posts though.

• Kaela

Kaela's also has an additional outfit for her main sprite, and her two alternate sprites are both close to only needing final render.

• Kyt

Finally (for the main cast), Kyt has a bunch of alts for her base sprite, most of them being tail variants. 

For both Kyt and Beth, I haven't put too much time into their sprites because Kyt has a very minimal presence in the demo build (which, as of now is looking to be mostly the common route over the course of the first full month of the game and is, of course, what I'm currently working towards) and Beth just won't appear at all, so for all her fans... sorry, she just shows up way too late and I wouldn't want to make a demo that was not representative of what to expect in the full version. 

I thought of a bunch of ways to potentially include her in the first month, but they all made her feel shoehorned into the narrative, so unfortunately you'll have to wait until the game is properly completed (or for a much lengthier, patreon/kickstarter exclusive demo build potentially) to meet her.

Anyway, moving on from the main girls to the supporting cast:

• Ilse

Ilse has an alt for her main sprite as well as one additional sprite that's just in need of final render. She'll have more sprites since she's a pretty important character and is present in the story since day one, but I've been putting more focus on the main girls compared to the side characters for now.

• Samual

Samual also has an alternate sprite in progress, but currently it's in the flats stage. He did get a fully rendered alt for his base sprite though.

• Torin

Torin's base sprite is only in need of final rendering and he also has an additional sprite in the flats stage.

• BB

BB also has an additional sprite in the flats stage.

• Jennigje and Ronde

These two have nothing to do with each other, but I've grouped them together since they're the only characters who don't appear in the demo at all that have their base sprites fully rendered

Now, for all the characters who either won't appear in the demo at all or aren't central enough to have gotten any work done outside of flats so far:

• Hwi

• The Hasida family (Dara, Chelle, Danielle)

• The Bonini family (Naki, Konsai, Shō, Arare)

• The Isa family (Fumizuki, Nyoko, Aguri)

And that's all for the sprites for now! I'll of course be posting most individual updates as characters reach certain levels of completion, so look forward to much more of that in the future!

Now, some of you might be thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of characters. This sure seems like it's going to take a long time."

Yes.

Anyway, moving on to the next section:

AREAS

This section will mostly be limited to places that show up in the demo and haven't been posted here in some form before, so for example, places like Alys's house, Kaela's house etc. exist, but you won't see them in the demo build and so they won't be shown off here. 

Additionally, I won't be showing off every single background I have for every single area.

• Io's Apartment

Of course, both of these backgrounds have their own day, afternoon and night variants, I just don't want to show absolutely every version of every background here either since it would feel redundant. 

You can assume the same for most backgrounds going forward.

• Kana's House

• Daito Terminal (Arcade)

• Fruit-Full Parlor

• Edda Shopping Center

That's all I'm going to show for now, but I'll hope you look forward to visiting all sorts of places together with the girls!

ROUTES

Now, let's talk about something mostly relevant to the main game, route order. 

If you'd like to play SweetCanvas without any prior knowledge of how or when the route's will appear then it's best if you don't read this section. 

This is also taken from a Kickstarter update almost verbatim so if you've already read it there, you obviously don't need to read it again.

Although this visualization is mostly accurate, it is still a simplification of things, as, for example, you can have Alys Common and Kana Common events simultaneously with the appropriate choices, and some events may even change entirely (girls who may not have otherwise been there attending or vice versa, hanging out with someone unexpected instead etc.) depending on the choices made so be sure to try out a bunch of options to see how things might change, even if you're going for one girl in particular.  

It's also worth noting that for the girls with their own common route variants, not all of them are mandatory to do their route. 

I won't give away whose is and whose isn't though as I feel like you'll be able to figure it out yourself if you're paying attention to the character's personalities as well as the things they say and do.

Another thing I'd like to say about this is that of course, since it's ordered like this I do expect many people to play the routes in this order if they don't have anyone in particular that they're really interested in, but that doesn't make it the default "correct" play order per se. 

Feel free to do your favorites first in whatever order you choose, as the routes are written in such a way that (in my opinion) you'll still learn new and unique things about those specific characters and the world as a whole no matter what order you do them in so don't feel forced to do every girl in the order that their routes show up!

The demo will only cover the first month as mentioned earlier, and so, during it the only proper route you'll be able to see (and not even to completion) is Io's, but Kana Common and Alys Common will both be available to you as well.

WRITING UPDATE

Finally, I'll end off with an update on the current word count of SweetCanvas.

As of today, (and honestly it'll probably go up before the day ends but it doesn't really matter), JUST for the script, meaning only lines of dialogue and monologue that will actually show up in the game, no worldbuilding files, character building files, outlines etc. there are 158,823 words in SweetCanvas.

This is also of course, ignoring the fact that I've rewritten large swathes of dialogue and so on throughout the course of my time working on this.

For perspective, this is more words than two out of the three Lord of the Rings books have (separately of course), so it's fair to say that I'm pretty proud of the progress so far.

Of course, there's still a whole lot to be written, like a lot a lot since the final product will need to have at least 3x this many words, but I'm glad that I've made so much progress on it while also having to make the art assets and other art to post on twitter and get more patrons and so on, it's just an accomplishment for me, and of course, none of this would even be possible without all of your support, so sincerely, thank you so much.

You may have noticed that CGs were weirdly absent from this update, and honestly, besides the ones that I've worked on and can't show you for spoiler reasons, I've just been so focused on all the other aspects of this that I haven't been working on CGs all that much in comparison. 

They'll get done though! Eventually!

But yeah, thank you all again for all the support and thank you for reading and caring about my project if you've made it this far! I'll be back with more soon!!