Update - Shizu's way of waking up Shuji... (Patreon)

tl;dr - The bug is still there, despite my efforts; I've been working on actual content for the upcoming release and the May release, too.

This week's image

This scene is coming in a future update; hopefully not too far away, maybe even next month! But not March, because it needs to be locked behind the Shizu sex scene, and we're not up to that part yet. Anyway, it seems to me like it'd be a nice view to wake up to. ;)

I hope I haven't shown this one before - I feel like I did, but I looked in the update feed and it seemed like I hadn't, so let me know either way.

Bug hunting

Bad news came through this week for our bug hunting efforts. I was finally able to get a few tests done on our ingenious solutions to the "NOW LOADING" crashes, and I'm afraid while the system works as designed and reduces the memory load of the apartment, it doesn't seem to be fixing the crashes for people experiencing them. 

The abiding suspicion now is that there's some kind of memory leak within VNMaker's code and that's what's causing this, so that's not an easy thing to fix. We're going to keep working on it, but I think the fix just won't be ready in time for the next release. I'm going to forge on and put out the next patrons' update anyway, because I can't keep delaying that indefinitely. I'm sorry I don't have more to show for the delays that I've already had to accept. At the least I can say that the game is now slightly more optimised, so the apartment scene should load a little faster (maybe 33%) and run a little better on poorer machines, but it's not a radical change even so.

In the meantime, I'm going to put out an alternative "music free" version (it'll still have music, just not in the apartment), because that version seems to fix the bug. So if you get the bug you can play the music free version and if you don't you can play the original; it's a lousy compromise, but it'll do until we come up with something better.

Making actual content for the game

I'm plugging away now trying to finish off the Shizu content for the March release that I've been promising. I'm finding some of it a little hard to write, but it's not really bad writer's block so I think I'll get it done soon.

I've also mostly finished the content for the May release now, I think, which is a little weird. I know there's an obvious instinctive question of "how about releasing all that content at once?" but some stuff has to be locked behind other stuff anyway, and I've been trying to be more planned and systematic about how I do this stuff so my schedules remain reliable.

I'll probably add some more to the May release, actually - I'll try to add some plot scenes, a bit more voice acting and a couple of collector cards, but I'm proud I was able to get the jump on some stuff so that I'll have the time available to work on other important game priorities later.

Let me know what you think of the picture, my scheduling plans and the bug situation in the comments below!