Quick update & Release Date

Hey everyone,

Hope you enjoyed the April Fools' joke! That prank was quite entertaining to do, and I loved reading all your reactions.

Who knows, maybe someday I'll put my 3D skills to better use 😉

Anyway... let's talk about some real updates!

Release Date & News

Next update will release on April 11th. While I always aim for that bi-weekly cadence, my release cadence is "roughly bi-weekly" because development timelines and life commitments sometimes require a bit of flexibility. I appreciate your understanding!

I've also been working on something special behind the scenes for quite a while now, and I'm excited to finally reveal it: animations.

This feels like perfect timing because...

Platform Support Expansion

I heard you loud and clear on the platform poll.

There's significant demand for both Android and Mac support. I want to make the game work properly across these platforms, but this does present some technical challenges, particularly with the parallax shader effects that add so much depth to scenes.

Rather than delay multi-platform support, I've decided to compensate for these shader limitations with exactly that - animations.

On Animations

This comes after a lot of behind the scenes work to achieve a look and workflow I was happy with. Recently I finally achieved an important milestone in quality & speed that felt manageable as a solo developer.

More notes about animations:

• They're already COMPLETED up until the moment of the last update. So this isn't causing delays. I wanted to announce this only when they done.

• They're currently at about 80% polish level. That's the trade-off to ensure they are manageable at this stage. The idea is to iterate them over time while listening to feedback. They are functional and looking good, but expect some artifacts. Those last 20% can be very time consuming.

• They'll be toggleable in the settings for anyone who prefers the static CGs.

• While only key scenes have animations, I do believe these animations elevate certain scenes to another level. It's something I have always wanted to do.

So... this will intentionally be released as an experimental feature so I can gather your feedback and improve them over time. Based on that I will re-evaluate if this is the right approach.

To be clear: quality CGs remain my top priority. I'm not changing my approach to create CGs that accommodate animations whatsoever. That was an important lesson from OG vs Remake - I'm creating great CGs first, then adding animations as a separate improvement.

I'm genuinely excited about this plan and really hope it works out without major disruptions to development but I'll carefully review this experiment and can change at any point if it doesn't work out.

Thanks for your patience and continued support.

Cheers,
Tori