House cleaning: Tiny delay of LIGHTKRAVTE, shutting down the AiD store and other stuff (Patreon)

Yikes. Okay so the title of this post sounds way more drab than it actually is. Let me explain, leading with the more practical news up front. Big 2 points on the agenda today:

1) Small delay of fault - SILENCE THE PEDANT - LIGHTKRAVTE

2) Shutting down the AiD store

Small and final delay of fault - SILENCE THE PEDANT - LIGHTKRAVTE

So first things first without any BS: development of LIGHTKRAVTE is mostly on schedule and if we really pushed our schedule we can probably put it out on the 29th but after much deliberation we've decided to push the official release date by 2 weeks (So that's May, Friday the 13th. Fun eh?). Good thing we haven't publicly announced this eh....we most definitely will though on the 29th because this time we're almost certain we'll hit the May 13th deadline.

Long story short, we want to polish this game as much as possible prior to release. See, the thing about linear Visual Novels... the value of first impression is much higher than other games that can be patched. Imagine a book with missing pages or ink blobs that cover up random paragraphs due to printing errors. Even if you get the fixed pages later it just kinda kills the momentum and magic so we really really want to get this shit golden right out of the gate.

The workload to make 100% fully animated character sprites is, to put it mildly, bonktacular😂. If you thought the MS2b tech demo from last year was "bordering on anime" oh, boy...do we have something special brewing. LIGHTKRAVTE's animation quality is miles beyond what we started with in MS2b and it is the quite marvelous thing. But. with this level of granularity, every little thing that can go wrong will go wrong and when you notice these little errors in the sprites during gameplay there is no going back. Even if it's an error of a split second, you will notice till the end of the game:

Consider your suspension of disbelief shattered

Speaking of not being able to go back... you know what else is we definitely can't go back to? Making non animated visual novels. And perhaps, you too, patron of the arts, might find it difficult to readjust to visual novels of yore once you see this amount of movement from character sprites. 

The additional 14 days should be enough to address a bunch easter eggs and fun-materials that we want to put in too. You know, the ideas that come up during production but gets pushes aside with a "maybe if we have time at the end" because the main part isn't done yet. 

Anyways, we made a final sneak peak video to show you more behind the scenes. Please check it out! Or not. Don't watch it if you want to go into it totally blind! There are no spoilers, but we might spoil the initial impact of just how much these freaking characters move. It's pretty cooooooooool. (Make sure to watch it at 60FPS and at 4K if it's available, it's quite stunning)

2) Shutting down the AiD Store (for now)

It's not a permanent thing but we're gonna have to shut down the AiD store for a while because the shipping situation just refuses to get any better. Perhaps we can reopen it once we can use EMS more reliably but till then it's just simply not practical for us to figure out the shipping process every time a random order comes in. Hopefully we can hand this process off to a third party... but I can't really promise anything right now.

FInally, we're really sorry about the delay but please, please trust us on this as I think it will be for the better for all of us. LIGHTKRAVTE the story, had so much more to say than we initially realized and has demanded to be taken more seriously from the AiD team. Good stories tend to grow into its own and LIGHTKRAVTE is definitely one of those examples. 

Anyways, thats it for now. Again, thank you for your continued patience. If you have any questions, do hit us up via DM or drop us a line in Discord.

-Munisix