(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! So, just to preface this weekly update, you might be expecting a really big one since we skipped last week's update due to the covid vaccine shots (we're all doing fine now, so no worries), but this update is going to be pretty normal sized. I've been struggling pretty hard this week with mental issues, which is something I've dealt with for years but it's been especially bad this week. I don't really know why, but I'm planning on seeking some mental help soon, now that our household is fully vaccinated.

First up in the update is something from last week. In the video up above (which is playing in slow motion to make the effect easier to see), you can see a comparison shot of the game's screen transition fade effect - before, the fade was as simple as drawing a transparent black box on top of the screen, which makes for a perfectly workable transition, but it looks kinda muddy and flat. I decided to rewrite it using a very simple shader that adds a flat amount of color to each pixel instead, and the result is an effect that fades the darker colors very quickly, while the brighter colors stay visible for longer. You can see the effect most clearly by looking at the lights and windows, or the metal bits of the room transition doors. It's a simple and subtle change, and I'm not sure how much anyone but me will care or even notice lol, but the effect is much nicer if you ask me.

For this week, I spent most of my work time refactoring our H-scene code, which was an absolute spaghetti mess and made it so adding new H-scenes into the game required hours of work, even after the animation was done. Refactoring it took a lot longer than I thought it would, but I decided to rework it now because of how many new H-scenes were added this update, which made it very clear how inefficient (and frankly annoying to work with) the old code was. The refactoring is pretty much done now, thankfully, and should make implementation of future scenes much quicker.

My work may have been a struggle, but Orexius has been cranking out work like crazy - here's some of the cutscene animations he did for Birch and Alicia this week.

We also have the finished version of that 3D model I mentioned a few updates ago, and he's here to say hi!

This guy won't be in the next update just yet, unfortunately; we don't have the time to give him proper animations, so he'll be making his ingame debut in v0.45 instead.

Lastly, Orexius also updated Alicia's.. "solo" H-scene, which you can see a preview of right here. It now includes a second variation of the animation, as well as an "outro" of sorts.

And that's it for this weekly update. We're going to try and wrap up development of v0.44 as soon as possible, but it might end up being released somewhat late in the month, or having some intended features delayed until next update. My apologies ahead of time if either of those end up happening; we're going to try to get it done on time, but I can't make any promises as there's still quite a bit to do to wrap it up. If it does get delayed longer than you'd like, don't forget that you can unpledge and you'll still receive the update when it comes out. In the meantime, though, thank you so much for continuing to support us!