March has flown by! This month has been plagued with irl work, but I'm personally really happy with the progress we've made! I'm currently sick as I write this because my body always decides it's funny to get sick when my workload gets the worst; my cat has kicked me out of the bed so he can have it all to himself, and here I am! On an important note, we'll be sharing a roadmap soon with our plans for the Extended Demo release. We are still aiming for a June release, but with Raquel getting a full-time job, there are some changes that have been done to the workflow and workload of the team—more on that along with our roadmap, coming in a few days, hopefully :^)

Now let's jump into March's devlog! 💜

This month Raquel has managed to pull off two expression sets, Raeya and Envy's, and I've coded them accordingly! Now while taking the screenshots I've noticed a few things that need tweaking, but nothing major. Here you have a beautifully blushing Raeya because she deserves some love! 💜

Remember that the Layered Image Tool we use is made by the amazing, ever kind-hearted Feniks!! 💜

Also this dude.

Airyn started working on the next background, the first you'll see in two different times of day! I'm really excited to see it finished. Sadly, we're saving the preview of those for our Kickstarter folks, so I'm afraid the public will have to wait a bit more to see them :^)

She has also polished the background you see above, which some of you might recognize from the early days! There's a bit more storytelling going on, and the lightning has been modified to better represent early morning. She's also fixed some objects, added more, and overall enhanced the River's kitchen!

Here on the writing department we (meaning I) are almost at 70k words. That's more than 20k words of extra content! Which is great!

I still am not finished. There's a whole scene for Ara left to write, a few choices to tweak, and the new prologue ending, which will lead you to the route selection. I'm also trying to implement choices people have been asking for while keeping them organic and make them work. The "I want to kill myself" choice is one of them, haha.

I want to finish everything this month so Allie can take a look at the script during May and fix my Spanish oopsies.

We have patchnotes now! We mentioned this two devlogs ago, but here's the real deal. Thanks again to Feniks who helped me figure out the code; whenever the demo (and in the future, the whole game) updates, you'll get a pop-up notification with the changes. You'll also be able to access the patch notes via a new, sparkly button added to our previous ones! :^)

Also, I programmed our Kickstarter backers' special thanks! This was three or four days of me writing these by hand because it was more comfortable than CTRL+C and CTRL+Ving. Don't ask me why, I just felt way better doing it that way! There were some folks who opted out of having their name displayed, and they get a special thank-you too if you scroll down! :^)

Our composer, Tomás, has been working on our soundtrack; for the Extended Prologue we needed two tracks and they. are. done.

Not absolutely completed as Tomás wants to check them again and actually produce the high quality, finished version, but they are sooooooo cute. Agh. Tomás is working so hard and we love the tracks so much :`)! As I'm writing this, he sent another track, haha. He's the absolute best, so please make sure to support him and his work if you can!

Also, I have been fighting with our manufacturer for some reasons (more on that on our Kickstarter update, as this concerns them the most), but everything should be alright as of now. Hopefully we'll have the definitive proof of our pins after the changes we requested!

As for our irl whereabouts, this month has been specially hard on me due to my PhD courses beginning all at once, but I'm managing! I also have had to write three papers (I'm still writing two of them) with my colleague (and friend!) with a very tight deadline, so I'm dedicating most of my time to that.

On a lighter note, this month I have been taken off my OCD meds! After a year and a half of therapy and meds, I'm finally ready to tackle things without the help of medication, which is as scary as it is exciting. I'm not quitting therapy, though! Not until I'm ready.

Raquel is also getting used to her full-time job, which she's thankfully enjoying! Things are still hectic for her as her day is basically cut in half, but she's confident with a little more time she'll be able to juggle everything efficiently. As a team, we have already talked about what this means for LiL and for Ravenstar, so more on that on our upcoming roadmap :^)

And that's it! Phew! Can't believe I've managed to pull this devlog off in a day. If there's more typos than usual, then you know why, haha. Now I've got to tackle the Kickstarter version, which includes more stuff and our merch update, so I'm off to work on that!

I hope you have enjoyed this devlog, and as always, thank you so much for your support, your kindness, and your patience. It means the world!

Let's talk soon! 💜