Hiya! I figured I'd let people know how things are going so far.

The next build is still planned to be out on December 15th. At the moment, I've written 7.5k words, so I'm technically ahead of schedule this time, but I've still got a lot left to go.

As a note, the updated Jeffrey expressions are finally done and will be in the next build. Personally, I like the improvements Sarah's made to them. (Also, for clarity, I have not switched artists. Sarah is the same artist I've had since the beginning, but she goes by Sarah now.)

For comparison: Old

And new

Oh yeah, in the last update, I added a new question to the survey asking what things you all want me to focus on. These are the results so far.

It's been fairly evenly split the whole time, so I guess that means none of these would be a bad idea to work on. Granted, I don't want to spread myself too thin, so I'm focusing on some of these for this update, and then I'll focus on other aspects in other future updates.

The first vote was for editing/rewriting earlier scenes, so I went through and revised the first four days in the story. I'm still not fully satisfied with everything, but I do feel like it's a step in the right direction, at least. The changes aren't too major, but the story should flow a bit better now.

I am planning to write another side story or two for this update as well. I enjoy writing from other characters' perspectives, and if you guys enjoy reading them, I see no reason not to do more.

I'll likely try working on fixing up the extras menu sometime later this month. Some of the buttons and stuff were sort of a makeshift thing since I was running out of time with the previous build. As far as adding new extras goes, I have a few ideas, I just need to work out how to implement them.

Soundtrack improvements and UI will likely have to wait until a later build. As I've been writing the next set of scenes, I've realized that I'll need to make quite a bit of music for this update, which likely won't leave me with enough time to also do touchups on previous tracks yet. UI is something I may try tweaking with here and there, but I'll likely wait until a time where I can get some help from Sarah on it. As of now, this update is already going to be fairly large in terms of art and music resources that are needed. Still, I do see that UI updates and sountrack improvements are things that some of you are interested in, so those are up there on my list.

Oh yeah, as one last thing: while talking to one of my friends, I made a passing comment that it might be cool if I had JRPG-like sprites to put in the side stories menu to show which characters are in each story. I maaaaaaay have ended up running full speed ahead with that idea, and so I tried my hand at making pixel art of each of the characters.

I'm happy with them over all. I'm wanting to do little things like this here and there for the VN, because it's fun, so why not.

Anyways, I hope you're all doing well! Update should be out on December 15th!