A Joint Bath

Hello everyone,

I hope you made it through the holidays without too much stress. (For me it was a bit of both joy and stress, but yeah that's how it usually is)

Right after christmas I continued fixing the current version. There was a problem with the additional talent point system & some other minor bugs, I released a hotfix and updated the download version to 0.5.2.5b in case you didn't notice. Also check the hotfix b info in case you ran into the problem with everyone falling asleep forever.
I didn't get any feedback in regards of the christmas event...so I just hope everyone was able to trigger it.

Now back to what else I have been up to in the last few days: Even before fixing the bugs I have been working on new animations for the bonus scene with Emily/Frisha/Mira. So far I've made 8 animations for it but I'm planning to make some more for transitions. Originally I had hoped to finish this today, but since even the animations aren't done yet this is impossible. So this scene will be released next week when it's done.

Since this is my last post this year, it's time to do a little review of the past year.

The year started with Umah's update. Looking back it was the right decision to make it after the Rumah update as it would have felt bad to leave it hanging there (Otherwise Umah would still be in that cage now a year later).
After that came Gwen's update and with it finally the house renovation which I have been waiting to do in a while. Athia's update followed and I learned to work with water textures which this coming scene will also benefit from.
In April I've been working on Ophilia's update and with it some adjustments to the inn. In May it was finally time to make Anya's update. Her character was waiting since 0.1 to get some attention. I've been working on this for 2 months, In the middle of working on that I was hit with covid which caused problems with the release scedule which I wasn't able to mend for the following months.
Anya's update took until the end of July where I finally got to work on the update for Helena. This was again more complex and I made first steps with light for my scenes (which wasn't all perfect but in the end it was worth spending the time on it).
It took me until September and by then I really struggled with keeping up the bonus scenes together with the normal content updates.
I didn't mention all the bonus scenes that I made over the past year, but if you read through the posts you will see there has been one for pretty much every month until  September. I made them more and more complex this together with the lost week from covid made me pause bonus scenes after Tia's scene to get back on track.
I hope that I don't have to pause bonus scenes again in the future, but if necessary I will do that so that there is enough time to progress the actual story. They add a lot to the story developement, but making them too complex actually hurts the progression.
Lyvia's update was what followed. Looking back I should have just sticked with 1 merc type as doing it with 3 made it really complicated in terms of variable management. This caused a lot of trouble and I worked more on mechanics than on actual storytelling. I had a lot more plans for this feature, but for now I had spend enough time on it so we will see what the future brings.
It was important to me to get Lyvia's quest to a somewhat completed state. I know there is still room for something more (Ronya), but that will come in another update.
And now we're at Tia's update with the goal of bringing Tia's quest to a conclusion that hopefully satisfies you and me.

So all together I'm happy with the progress I've made over the past year. It was a lot of work, but I wouldn't have it any other way. This game and having the time to fulltime work on it means a lot to me. Thank you all for making this possible!

I wish you all a happy new year!