Hello everyone! I'm making this post public to tell you about the development of the next update, and to show you something I've been working on.

About v0.4.3

The next update will focus on Laura (picking up after the cliffhanger). Originally, this update was going to touch on deeper themes of her character, but I decided to postpone that aspect for 2 reasons, the first one is that it doesn't fit with the current plot, and the second one is that it would require a lot of assets and I want to focus on other things for the time being. Besides, I prefer to reserve that part of Laura's story for when it has more impact and I can dedicate all the resources to it.

Instead, I plan to do something more fun, a minigame parodying Imperial Gatekeeper in which you have to strip search Laura, the complexity of it will vary depending on whether I'm on schedule or not, for now, I'll work on the assets and in the worst case it will be a scripted point and click.

(You can get a glimpse of what I have done in the Sneak Peek that I have posted on my patreon, here: Sneak peek - Strip me!)

The blender initiative

For those who already know, the way I make my game's art is using Koikatsu screenshots as a base and draw over it, but since my style has evolved so much since I started this that it no longer fulfills its original function and I end up redrawing everything (I'm exaggerating a bit, but I could probably not use them). In an attempt to increase production, I have started learning blender to make proprietary models of my characters that already match my style, and in this way, I can trace them or at least redraw them to a lesser extent to lighten the load.

It's a long shot, there's no certainty that it will work, and it will require experimentation to be sure whether I can create a model that matches my style, but if I succeed (coupled with stylized renders) it could radically improve future development.

It's my first time sculpting so it doesn't reflect how the characters will look like in the future. The plan is to learn how to model a character because I want to have control over that aspect, but if I see that it works I might commission someone to take care of the retopology and so on, I would just sculpt the characters to focus my time on the game, but first I have to take this step myself.

I'll probably do another iteration of Rea, then model the MC and some other girl before I try to retopolize them, if you guys are interested will probably post the process on twitter.

While I plan to dedicate hours to it as if it were a job, it won't monopolize my time so it doesn't affect the development. Also know that the game will NOT become 3d, the goal of this is to create a model that resembles as much as possible to my style to produce drawings faster, so don't worry about that.

What I am working on now?

At the moment I want to advance with the assets and complete Laura's new sprite to move on to the writing, I will try to have that defined in order to have a good idea of what I have to do. 

I know there is a bug in one of the menus but as it doesn't break the game I haven't fixed it yet, I also have to see how to integrate fan-made translations into the game without ruining the saves (Because I want to tweak the menus and lay the groundwork for the gallery), so that's why I haven't done it yet... if you don't mind, I'd like to make some progress with the writing before that, but if you feel the bug is too annoying I'll change the priorities.

That's all for now,  thank you very much for everything, and thanks for your patience, I'll try to have a progress update ready for next week!