Hi! I’ve made tons of progress on Book 2 this past month. I have a few screenshots to show you.

In the screenshots above, you might notice that old friends have new looks. They’re more expressive, their color schemes are a bit better, and I overall quite like a few of them.

AI Mode is pretty much done. Now for the colossal task of rewriting the entire thing for Human Mode.

Here’s an example of the difference in writing between AI mode and Human Mode in the same scene.

Giving the characters personality and trying to make the plot make a tiny bit more of sense is one hell of a venture.

Oh, there some changes made to Book 1 in preparation for the next book.

Changes to Book 1

• The portraits’ heights have been changed. Everyone is now slightly shorter - this should fix the really, really, REALLY small little space inbetween the bottom of the portraits and the BGs that nobody except for me seems to have noticed. It’s been driving me insane for months, but now it’s gone. Whew.

• Some sounds and music tracks were edited so they are somewhat the same volume.

• Minigame C will now only be unlocked after finishing the last book, instead of being available after seeing a certain amount of endings on Book 1.

• The credits were removed to make way for a better and cooler-looking sequence that will play at the very end of the entire game.

• Nathan has sadly not been removed.

I’d also like to share some interesting things that came out of the initial testing for Book 2.

• There’s a character who has a theme song that plays almost everytime they’re on screen. I found that the track’s audio is a little bit too low compared to the other tracks, so I tried editing it. But everytime I opened it, it would open an error. I tried using other programs, but the track playback would only play an annoying beeping noise. I’m also unable to convert the file from .mp3 to .ogg due to this issue. Is it corrupted?

In game, the audio plays just fine. Spooky. Maybe the game is more cursed than I thought.

• There’s also the bizarre case of the portrait that resized itself. All of the game’s portraits are originally drawn in a high resolution, then sized down to about ~700x1100 pixels. However, one character’s ‘smiling’ portrait seemingly resized itself down to 120x120 pixels after the initial editing and resizing. The result was that everytime the character smiled, they would get really, really tiny.

I have no memory, or reason, for doing this. Maybe something went wrong while exporting that one expression… or perhaps that person was never meant to be seen smiling. Oh well!

That’s about it for updates. Thanks for reading!

• Meiri