Preparations for the 0.5.9.6 update

Good afternoon,

Another week almost over, so time to give you a review of what I did the past days.

First of all, I would like to comment on the results of last week's poll.
In total (Patreon & Subscribestar summed up) Helena got the majority with 216 votes. Sabrina took 2nd place with 151 votes. So Helena won and I have already started working on the scene for her and Yasmine.
Now of course I've read your comments (as always) and I know that it would be tempting to make more than just the Helena scene, sadly however that is impossible alone by the fact that I wouldn't be able to complete it before Christmas. And working on more Winterhowl scenes in January would just feel out of place. So it will only be Helena's scene this year. However since I also really want to make something for Sabrina and she went 2nd after all, I will set her scene as fixed for next year's Winterhowl (So there won't be a vote next year and I will make that scene then).

Ok, now about the past week: Since I saw the voting results in favor of Helena on monday already (By then she had such a big lead that I doubted any other option would win), I decided to directly focus on her Winterhowl scene so that it definitly would be finished in time.
I started with a new outfit for her and Yasmine which required me to make some textures for the clothes. When I was finally happy with the outfits I made new sprites/dialog images for Yasmine & Helena.
Over the course of the week, I continued working on animations and sketched out how I envisioned the course of the little quest around Helena.
To then get a better feeling for the story I wrote first dialogs and events for this quest (In the process I reworked Yasmine's old getting to know images). This isn't done yet of course, but a rough plan on how everything plays out was necessary. To save some workload I reused some of the assets I already made in past years (decoration). I'm still by far not done with editing the animations, but since I still have about a week left to get everything done I'm optimistic that it will be possible without crunch this time.

Even though I mostly worked on the Winterhowl scene this week, I also finished some images for Bianca's quest that I've been working on in the week before. I originally thought about adding one of these images to this post, that would give you a hint about how Bianca's quest would continue, but in the end I decided against it, as it would have been too much of a spoiler.

The reason I've prioritized working on the Winterhowl scene is obvious: I want to finish it in time, and if I still have time at the end, I can of course work on Bianca's quest, but that's a bonus and isn't the main focus of the 0.5.9.6 update.

So now I'm trying to finish the Winterhowl scene as early as next Friday if possible, in the worst case on the 24th. There are still a few hours left today and I intend to use them for some more image editing.

That is all for now, I wish you all a nice weekend!