A Fateful Pact (Patreon)

Good morning!

It's now past midnight here, as so often shortly before a release I decided to finish the update first before now writing this report.

It's been a long week. I pushed myself a bit and thanks to that I was able to get the update done (almost) in time. Until early this morning many of the story strings hang losely around and the quest was pretty much unplayable. I connected the last strings, added 1 additional animation and now it is hopefully all working and playable.

A bit more in detail about this week: Most of the animations for this update were completed this week. and by that I mean editing and implementation. Also a lot of the quest dialogue was written in the past days. Until a bit earlier today I wasn't sure if I could really get a working version together. Sometimes things work out as planned.
But of course not without some restrictions. As already mentioned in the release post I had to make a few cuts here and there. Originally I had planned to make some more interactions with the priestesses (you will notice that when you talk to Gabriel - the monk in the kitchen). This part isn't done yet but it will of course be added in 0.5.5.0.
Another part that is currently not done is Syfa's part of the quest. For those of you who have made a pact with her there will be an extra corruption route + some changes for the ending of the quest.

The questlog is something that gave me a bit of a headache for this quest. I must admit that I was tempted to leave it completely blank and only give the task "investigate in the murder of Bernard". after all if I do a step by step thing then there is pretty much no discovery that you can do yourself... I will have to see how I continue it for the rest of the quest.

Time to speak a bit about the goals for July:
Now that the 0.5.4.6 update is mostly done (some bugfixes probably missing) I will continue with Penny & Natasha's bonus scene. This fits into the theme of this update and the scene is overdue. (I know that some of you disagree and would prefer if I only focus on Mira's story, but I've delayed this scene now for over a month already, it's really time to get it in so that a new scene can be voted for).

After the bonus scene is done I will continue with the story and complete the quest for the monastery. Since all the surroundings are now done I can finally focus only on the juicy part, which is writing events and some more interactions for the women. Especially Mira needs some more content now that she has a new outfit. This is also something I would like to update at Arenfield... together with some of the scenes she has there... But I know that this update is already a lot bigger than others before it. As much as I love to work on Mira's content, at some point I have to restrain myself and move on to what comes after. We will see how much I can cramp into this month, by the end of it I really want to move on to the next story, which will be about Melissa (finally).

So that's where we currently are. I want to give this update a satisfying ending, so I hope you will be fine with me finishing the story around the monastery for probably the whole month. If I manage to get this done quicker then cool! I won't dally of course, but since I can't really estimate the time needed, I don't want to raise false hopes that Melissa's update will also come this month.

We will see how it goes, for now it's time for me to get some sleep!
I wish you all a nice weekend!

@Wayfarer: release link has been updated to 0.5.4.5