Hello again! Yesterday was a bit of fun, but today we wanna talk about some of the stuff we hid in the cracks of our obligatory joke post.

You may have noticed, but we’re in the process of going over some of the older sprites and giving them a fresh coat of paint. Yesterday’s screenshot had a brand new Caprice, for example.

While not all of the demo characters are getting this treatment (pretty much all of the writing club members sans Mekki are fairly recent), a fair chunk of them are. This’ll likely be the last time we ever try and touch up older sprites—our current goal is to get every character in the VN a default pose ASAP, which should equate to a more consistent style regardless of how much time goes by during the rest of development. We’ve actually finalized our entire cast as well as their designs recently, so we can now focus entirely on sprite creation, instead of mixing it with brainstorming.

Secondly, you may have noticed a few Skrats pictures on our blog(s) lately. That’s because recently we asked Skrats to join the team. His role is to redline the sprites and CGs, as well as actually provide creative input/criticism on both. It isn’t something you’ll immediately notice, as his job isn’t super IN YOUR FACE, but the results have been apparent. Here’s a (tentative) example: the image on the left was a CG present in the demo, while the image on the right is some brainstorming he whipped up to make it a bit more interesting. Of course, All-Maker is still doing the CG lineart and ultimately has the final say in terms of composition and the like. Even with the samples attached below it’s easy to see how big of a deal this has ended up being.

We’ve set a writing deadline of a minimum 2-3 scenes completely finished a week, which may not seem like a lot on the surface but in reality it’s pretty brisk and has been consistent which has let us start planning schedules around it. Likewise, Shiz continues to chip away at our custom VN engine constantly.

So basically good, consistent progress all around with a nice focus on improving our overall quality.