(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everybody. Not gonna beat around the bush, I don't really have anything to show this week, so this update will be purely text. We still got work done, of course, but it's all been on stuff that I can't really show off. So instead of showing off individual things we worked on, I figured I'd go ahead and give a general status update to let you know what we've been doing, and what's left for this update.

Most of what I did this week was, surprise surprise, working on Area 5. Mostly, it boiled down to level design and script work; I mentioned before that I finished writing a bunch of scripts for this update, and this week I got the majority of the voice acting back from our actors, so I spent a lot of time going over audio and picking out takes. We've also hired new VAs for the new characters I mentioned in last week's update, so with any luck they'll make their debut as well. Since I have most of the voice acting I need, all that's left for the new cutscenes and conversations is to implement them; there are some unique cutscene animations that we won't have ready, so some of the cutscenes might seem a little odd/incomplete, but c'est la vie, such is the nature of game development.

Anyway, Orexius and Red are still working on their respective scenes, and Puffernutter continued working on Area 5 stuff (she's currently focused on the above-water portion; we have a lot more we want to do with the underwater spaces, but for now her attention is better spent on the sparse above-water space).

As far as what we have left for v0.39 - here's a quick rundown. -More level design for Area 5 -As much environment detail as we can pack into Area 5 (this work will definitely continue into future updates) -Implementing all the cutscenes and conversations I wrote (there's a lot of them) -Adding an easier "Story" difficulty mode, which will dramatically reduce the difficulty if chosen -New enemy still needs to be completed, is missing some intended functionality -New sound effects needed for various things, like the new enemy -More testing of new accessibility features, to ensure they all work as intended and the game can be completed with them active -New enemy H-scene, and Torguis CG scene need to be finished That's all the things I DEFINITELY want to get done for this update; I also want to possibly implement another upgrade, but it's very possible I won't have the time to do it. It may not seem like there's much left to do, but seeing as how we're already 1/3rd through this month, it's definitely getting down to the wire, and level design especially takes a LOT of time.

Anyway, that's all I have for this week. Sorry there's not really anything to show off, we're definitely at that point in the update cycle where all our exciting stuff has already been done and we're just plugging away at all the less interesting/more secretive stuff to get the update ready for release. As always, thank you all so very much for the support. See you in next week's update!