Goooood evening everyone. I'm back with another update about what's going on behind the scenes in game development world.

So first things first, I will be out of town from the end of January until part way through February so you're all getting a new subscriber only version before I leave! I'm planning on having it out around January 24th or 25th. Unfortunately, that means I won't be around to release any patches for bugs so I'll do my best to make sure that there is nothing game breaking in the update.

Now, onto what is getting worked on.

On Ari's side, I have her working on 3 new scenes for this update and the art for the skill tree menu!
Ari is working on a new scene featuring Julina, a scene featuring Floyd and his slave and a scene with solo Lilly!
For the skill tree menu she's starting by making icon borders for the skills (an unlocked and a locked state) making the art for the Touch of Lust skill which is currently the only one in the game, the background for the passives tree and the background for the skill unlock and more information screen.

This update was also supposed to include two new characters made into Live2D but one of the people I contacted turned out to be a scammer and the other was a combination of too difficult to work with and did not produce the quality I was looking for, so, unfortunately, we will be getting no new Live2D sprites and I may have to put it on hold until I can find a reliable artist for the task. If anyone has suggestions on an artist for Live2D, please reach out to me! Side note: I am planning on putting Ari back on making Lilly's sprite into Live2D with the same level of detail as she did Wistala's. I will have her work on this during one of the times I am working on a big main story content update that is less art and more text!

So, speaking of main story content, after this update there will only be 3 more scenes before Act 1 Chapter 1 is finished. Act 1 Chapter 2 will start with a mission similar to the mission in the mountains to fight the wolves but will feature a whole host of new additions. The mission will vary slightly depending on what faction you are working for, you will have the opportunity to build your team (you, Oliver, and Lilly are required on each mission but you will be able to take up to 2 other characters with you in your party), the combat system will be implemented and a tutorial created, and there will be custom interactions between you and your party depending on who you have taken with you. There should be more skills added at this point as well. For the time being, don't set your expectations too high for the art on the combat system. The very first iteration is likely to be a lot of placeholders but so long as it functions we will continue to improve it. The goal is to have animated pixel sprites for the combat f a slightly higher quality than what you'd see in an rpgm game.
But Wistala, I hear you say, I don't want combat in my story based VN! Well, you're in luck because I will be adding an auto-win button so if you're just here for the story you can have it! But combat will have some spicy benefits! During combat, combatants can be downed and then captured for a spicy twist (You can capture enemies and enemies can capture you or your teammates.) I will also be adding in an option to disable having enemies do spicy time with your teammates if that's not your thing since it goes along with that NTR theme depending on who gets captured.
But WISTALAAAA, I hear you saying again, isn't all of that an insane amount of work? Yes, unfortunately it is. I will be hiring someone to do the programming on the inventory system and the combat system so my amateur ass will only have to fill in the details once the base of it is made. I will also be hiring a new artist for the pixel sprites! As for the story part of the missions, the different variants based on faction and party composition make the amount of text required for the mission daunting to say the least. The plan for this will likely be that each main story update will take 2-3 months and will only contain one or two new CG's from Ari so I can focus on the story itself and making and balancing combat encounters.
The actual details for how combat will play out will be explained later. I have most of it prepared but I don't want to promise something here that winds up getting cut so I'll lay most of it out closer to it's release.

Phew, I think that's about it for now. The last several updates have been slow and kind of small and I apologize for that. I also realize it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in my ability to manage all of the things I just talked about but I am very close to being done with the remodel that has consumed my life over the last months. I am much healthier than I have been in a long time, both physically and mentally and I can't wait to return my entire attention back to this project!

Here's to a wonderfully degenerate 2025!

It's been a while since I have done one of these and the reason for that is there hasn't been a lot to update you all on. So why am I doing one now that it is less than two weeks before the next update? Well, I wanted to get this out to help taper expectations a little bit. Ari and I have miscalculated on the Live2D pretty severely. She is, as of this moment, only just finishing up on Wistala's sprite. I think, at best, the most art content we will have done for this next update is the Wistala sprite fully animated, a new outfit for Lilly and one scene with Lilly in the new outfit (which is NTR centered so won't even be for everyone). I'd first like to apologize for the snails pace we have been going at lately and talk about what we will be doing to fix it.

Obviously having Ari working on Live2D isn't going to be sustainable even if she could improve the speed of her animations by 100 or 200% so I am pulling her from animating and putting her back on new content full time. We will continue to maintain the 2 month update cycle with her making new content again. This does not mean I am abandoning Live2D. I will be trying out hiring a separate animator for sprites starting next month, however this is quite expensive and will be a slow process to get all of them updated. Converting the actual scenes to Live2D is being put on hold for the foreseeable future until I can afford it or all of the sprites and icons are animated.

In the meantime, I have been working on several new systems that will not be ready to ship with this next update so it is going to feel quite small but I hope to have most of them finished by the *next* update which will bring some very big changes.

I'd like to apologize once more for our slow pace as of late and thank you all for your patience with me while we work through the experiment that has been Live2D. I look forward to getting back to our normal 5-6 scenes per update going forward!

Hello everyone I come to you this early morning with some bad news. I have decided to delay the next release for a month, so until December 6th. There's a few reason for this. First of all, I am behind on the work due a combination of getting the house prepared for the remodel and a myriad of different health issues I have been trying to get fixed. I haven't been very active at all lately on f95, discord or subscribestar mostly due to these reasons. Second, Ari is behind on working on the sprites but for a much better reason than I am behind. We wanted to see just how detailed and alive we could make one of the sprites look and feel inside of Live2D, and while we accomplished that spectacularly. The test was done on Wistalas sprite and the results are incredible...that being said, it took Ari the better part of a month to accomplish it which was well past either of our expectations. That being said, we are going to give Lilly's sprite the same treatment since she is kind of the main sprite on screen most of the time. Now that Ari has more practice in Live2D, Lilly should take much less time to finish than Wistala did. Once Lilly is done we will still animate the other sprites but at a much lower level of detail so as to get them done in a more reasonable time frame. On that same note, we have also talked about getting Ari back to working on creating new scenes and outsourcing the animation of sprites and scenes to someone entirely different, though, for now, that's still just an idea. Broken Sky is very much still in development despite my radio silence recently. My medical issues are slowly getting themselves resolved and the busiest part of the remodel I am working on is coming to a close so things should be returning to normal shortly! Thank you all for your continued support and patience and I hope to have some fun changes for you all to play with in the next update!