Weekly Update (11-24-2025)

A somewhat better week overall. Finally got that retrospective posted yesterday. XD

There was an annoying bug this update that was screwing up a few cutscenes that used snoke and mirrors to change which character was showing as the player character, including the very intro, which was annoying. Thankfully, think I finally got that fixed (thanks to Rachnera for some help with the debugging and keeping me from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory there XD).

Anyway, doing that involved some interesting stats. The game has 286 scripts in it total as of this update. Moreover, the amount of script editing I did this update was low by my standards, but that still involved edits to 34 scripts. It's just kind of an interesting demonstration of how much my regular interaction with the game entails regularly communing with the eldritch entity that is its codebase. It's very much a living thing that I'm tweaking bits of all the time for various reasons.

But yeah, thankfully that's fixed and my smoke and mirrors are restored. XD There really is a fair amount of smoke and mirrors in cutscene design, I've always found the various tricks available for use in that an interesting conceptual space to explore. This isn't one I use too often, but the places it appeared were somewhat important.

Anyway, here are the things I meant to say about the next update. May want to skip the rest of this post until you've finished the update if you aren't caught up.

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So, basically, I need to design a lot of new playable characters next update. There will be one for every route, in fact (though Midnight and Twilight share). Previously the most party members I made in one update was three, back in v0.10. This time it will be four, and this requires a fair amount of design work. So, basically, I do think that will add a good amount of time to the next dev cycle. I want to say that the actual update won't be crazy long to compensate for that, but we all know my track record with promising short. :X

So, I'm going to estimate that the extra party members may add about an extra month to the coming dev cycle. We'll see for sure how that shakes out, but there's also the holidays coming up, so I'd rather err on the side of being safe with my estimate here. I do think the results will be worth it, as well. Has been quite a while since we've had new characters to play with. XD I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, for now I'm still on my break. Hoping to get back to things recharged and ready to get back into the next update after public release! I am looking forward to next chapter overall.