Hello everyone!

I apologize for taking a while to come back with another update - we've been a little distracted this Pride month with conentions and work! In this update, we finish implementing the rewrite of the first scene using the NVL-format and the Twine interactive we published some time ago, giving the first battle significantly more heft as a reading experience and significantly more diverging results.

For one, it's now possible to win or lose the first battle, based on the choices you can make!

Another change you'll notice immediately in 0.585 is that the GUI has changed - with a little bit of spare time, we've been able to implement some custom assets in the game rather than the default images - hopefully, you might find this a little bit more immersive.

However, it's also true that this update has taken a month to come out rather than the week I was hoping for - the main issue from my end is that there's been a lot of moments where the development of this project was based on "how can I just temporarily adapt rather than rework major parts of the project?" and steadily, this has added up to be a dangerous amount of overhead. I wish I could say that I used this month to productively rework the backend, but, well, a large part of the problem is pretty much that.

As a result, I intend to take the time between this update and the next finally cleaning up the backend, streamlining and rewriting the literal code script and the script itself to be more effective. I'm also considering about whether I want to continue using Ren'py, or if I want to switch over to the Narrat engine, which is a much lighter engine optimized to build Disco Elysium style narrative visual novels, rather than our current Ren'py, which is optimized to build Muv-Luv or Steins; Gate style visual novels - it depends quite a lot on whether the Ren'py animations and screen locations make the game feel better or worse.

Please let us know what you think!

P.S: Enjoy the Pride Month illustration our artist put up!