Hope everyone has been doing well recently! We're just right around the corner of getting our content out and moving along once again!

Our overall plan for April to start us off and keep things simple... We're shooting for two main releases this month. First release will be v0.20 (Free & Paid) removing the whole "Part" mess out of the titles, as the free version will feature about half of the episode for the public and the paid version for supporters will feature the whole episode, wrapping up episode 5's content for good.

Later in April, we're shooting for also doing v0.21. This will include episode 1 QoL fixes and additions, along with route episode content. This means players will get the chance to personally try out our new feature that displays the protag (Male or Female) on the text box ui throughout the gameplay. Our plan with that is slowly introducing it and getting it caught up for the whole game.

I want to briefly touch on the lack of posts being made recently as well. There's a few factors as to why there hasn't been a ton of weekly posts, partly there just hasn't been a ton to share as our sprite artist is working on stuff that is a bit secretive at the moment. Our cg artists are getting back into the swing of things too, with one of them that was sort of MIA for nearly two months. I've finally heard back from them and figured out what was going on, but on the art side of things, there just hasn't been a ton to share visually.

The other aspect is more on my personal happenings in the day to day, as I've been finding myself finishing up classes for the day and by the time I end up getting my personal stuff done, project work and a bit of free time for enjoyment mixed in. Its already time for bed to start the process over the next day. ^^" So, I've been trying to juggle when to toss out some posts at times.

I'd like to personally thank everyone once again for all the support and kind words recently! The amount of funding support seen during March leading into April has not only cleared our main funding goal, but we were pretty close to our 2nd funding goal that'd help cover more costs for cg art each month or possibly sink the extra into sfx/ambience needs for the game.

We're not sure what caused the increase in funding, if its related to the female protag being introduced into the game? But we're very very grateful for everything! <3

[~Dev Plans/Story & Programming~]

As mentioned, two releases are planned this month. v0.20 (Free & Paid) is what we'll focus on first.

I have heard back from our programmer and confirmed what our status is on being ready for releasing that content. They were recently sick with a fever and just recovered from that the other day, but talking with them... We're double checking over the content on our tests and all of the finalized gui elements for the game should be functioning as intended.

The only thing we won't have ready yet for a while is the title screen. We will have a temp placeholder button on the existing title screen in order to access the cg gallery screen though! We'll be asking for a ton of feedback on how the gui functions, our main concern seems like it'll fall on the text box and if the text and layout is good overall as we want to make sure the readability is solid for players.

Behind the scenes, there is a good amount of writing lore stuff going on, much that I can't share in detail to avoid major spoilers for the game's story and personal stories for characters. But there's a lot of documents that keep track of the timeline for how events pan out throughout the game in order to make sure the storylines we're trying to tell are on point.

Its a lot of work and pre-planning, thinking about what falls in line for stuff now and how it connects into events that aren't going to be in the game until 8 months from now and making sure we're on the right path with how everything connects.

I'm personally excited for many of the storylines to reveal themselves along the way and I believe there are some unexpected qualities that players will be surprised about when it comes to the overall story about the academy and motives, mixed with learning a deeper level about characters we haven't seen in the past yet. Perhaps even... There's someone we're close to that's hiding something about themselves and those running the school, but it'll only be a matter of time before secrets unveil and add to the mystery.

[~CG art~]

MarxeDP & AjoseMP have a plan for April's work, on Ajose's side.. We're looking to tackle a good chuck of cg stuff that has been paid for on a list. I talked with them just yesterday about it and from the sounds of it, they're already in action. We'll be sharing a collection post of those previews sometime this month.

Alongside that, Ajose will also have around 2-3 brand new cg scenes they can begin working on. These are for future route episodes and so I'm not sure how to go about sharing them quite yet, when they are ready. <.< I'll most likely keep the title of those posts non-spoiler related and in bold within the title "SPOILERS" will be the first thing mentioned. Then the images won't appear first thing, that way it doesn't ruin the surprise for those that want to go in blind.

Marxe is finishing up work on two cg scenes being updated and I have to talk with them sometime before the weekend to see what else they have planned for this month and how our list of paid cg art is looking by then too.

[~Sprite art~]

Lisa has been really busy during March, working on something secretive for the project. I'm really excited about how its coming along, but it won't be until a bit later when we fully reveal that. It'll be a very hard time trying to hold back on showing it off until then, but we do have other sprite stuff to showcase before then. :P

Lisa has started updating the bg character creator tool, one of our last sprite related things that needed to be updated to showcase the new eyes and some adjustments made to the game's cast and oc characters over the course of last year. The tool itself is a .psd file that we use for development in order to simply create a number of background students to help fill in minor roles that wouldn't need fully unique sprite files gameplay wise, but still looking good and the limitations will only be noticeable if you saw 3-4 characters made with the tool next to each other.

We have a list of minor sprite work besides that in order too, some a bit spoiler related and other stuff not so much. I'm hoping April will be a big month for sprite needs, if many of those minor needs listed are done. It'd leave us with 4-5 decent sized things left as we move into May and during the Summer to possibly wrap up sprite needs for the project. 

Previews for the bg creator tool changes will be shared this month sometime at the very least!

[~GUI~]

ds-sans came out of nowhere with the fully finished cg gallery screen last month! Something I wasn't expecting to be done until this month, but that means.. We only have the title screen remaining! Its hard to say if the title screen will take more than April to complete or not, but we're pretty much about to wrap up gui needs for the project!

Expect to see a ton of these previews for the gui stuff as a big collective post before our release of v0.20.

[~Other Notes~]

Depending on how stable our funding goes through April into May... Knowing gui needs will be done and then sprite stuff by Summer. We could very easily begin work on sfx/ambience work for the project in May. We know many want sfx for sure! We've collected a list of ideas for what kind of sounds to include into the game from safe for work types that aid the game generally and of course... The more naughty sounds needed to really boost those moments. :P

We already have the config settings ready to where, if a player doesn't want sfx on. They can easily turn it off or adjust the volume of those in case its too distracting.

Ambience would help aid and fill in areas for the music, where we want music playing in the game to feel fitting to select moments without being on repeat for 10-20 minutes at a time. ^^" It's a hard balance to get sound direction just right for a game and I have even more props to those with musical/sound talent in general after having to research and figure out how to properly handle things with that. (As I'm totally not a musically or sound talented person.)

My ultimate goal would be the addition of voice talent for the game, but I already know this will greatly rely on some sort of funding campaign, similar to our Kickstarter. Except the entire purpose of the funding would be seeing if there's enough interest to cover the costs for voice over work, which is pretty expensive when we're talking about a game with 300,000+ word count or so in total by that point.

[~Ending~]

If this is your first time joining along and you enjoy the project, please do consider supporting us on Subscribestar if you aren't already! Plenty of exclusive posts are made, at least 3 new posts every week or more!

Keep yourself informed and updated on development by following Subscribestar notifications or bookmarking our >Guide Post< You can also continue to keep updated through our Itch.io page or Twitter as well!

Be alert! The only websites that are officially ran by myself (Princess Bridget) and Messy Studios working on development of Messy Academy are from the following list below. Any place otherwise is unofficial and they might be impersonating us for their own gain. Avoid payments/donating to other sources as it won't be helping fund further development into our game!

>Subscribestar<
>Pixiv Fanbox<
>Kickstarter<
>Twitter<
>Itch.io<
>Pixiv<

(You can also find our official posts/account on these sites, but due to their nature we won't include links directly.)
>F95zone< (Username: Messy Studios)
>omorashi< (Username: Bridget1999)
>tapatalk< (Username: Messy Studios)

Be alert! The one and only official Discord server for following the Messy Studios team development is this one. >>Discord<< If you've come across any other server impersonating us, be sure to report your findings with me directly and steer other's interested in our video game project away from possibly scam attempts.

~ From all of us at Messy Studios! ~

To kick our first post for 2024 off! I'd like to let our $0 subscribers/followers know that our initial development report posted at the start of a new month will always be free to view, but any other news posts is typically part of our higher support tiers, plus the more exciting benefits.

This isn't meant to beat you guys down by any means! ^^" We're just getting our posting schedule back to normal, where December was the exception to this due to the whole Patreon purge that happened.

We'd love to consider feedback though about our supporting tiers on substar. If you have interest in supporting our active game development, but for some reason unknown to us, you can't or on the fence. We'd like to better understand if there's anything we can personally do to make the experience better or improve our quality of posts and benefits. <3

With that said...

I'd like to once again thank everyone who decided to support us during December in response to the abdl Patreon purge. If for any reason, you're still being billed by Patreon for pages to some abdl creators. I'd double check if they're even there anymore, because many big names in the community were hit and have reported some people were finding themselves billed for December, despite their creator not having a active Patreon page after the purge took place. >.<

Wrapping back to my thanks to everyone... We ended up reaching $700 of our $900 funding goal during December! <3 This will cover our team's costs for their skills in development during this month and any funding that we collect from January will cover February's development costs. So, we do encourage anyone that can spare it, to support us even at $5 tier as you'll receive plenty of goodies in the month that's exclusive and help keep content flowing along with new releases without having to cut anything.

Putting that aside for a moment. I'd also like to thank everyone for bearing with us despite everything. It was a rough December and I had wanted to get more content delivered, but there was a number of factors on top of the busy holidays that made it difficult. >.<

That's why we're looking to begin 2024 with a pretty hefty month of content for our game releases and we'll dive into our plans on that below!

[~Messy Studios Team~]

[~Dev Plans & Story~]

In case you missed our last post in 2023, we're beginning 2024 with a new programmer who joined us. Our previous programmer let me know during November that they had too much going on with other projects and dipped, so our old buddy Artie who had his hands tied with his own game currently stepped in. Artie helped where possible during November and December, giving me enough time to seek out a long term, solid programmer to interview and prepare for the long road ahead in 2024.

As of today, I've sent over the needed assets, details and plans to the new programmer to officially begin the continuation of game development on MA releases!

Our rough plan for the next 4 weeks is as follows, but please take these dates as a estimate and not a confirmed date. We'll try to let everyone know at least 24 hours prior to releases that content is coming out.

v0.20 pt 2 (+Bridget scene) [Release estimate: Jan 8-12th] [Public Free]
v0.20 pt 3 (3 scenes) [Release estimate: Jan 8-12th] [Supporter Exclusive]

v0.20 pt 3 (3 scenes) [Release estimate: Jan 22-26th] [Public Free]
v0.20 pt 4 (4 scenes) [Release estimate: Jan 22-26th] [Supporter Exclusive]

If the content is ready before these dates, we'll send out a 24 hour warning and release them sooner than listed. We want to get this content out as quickly as possible, just as much as you all wish to enjoy it! ^^

I've also mentioned it in great detail in other posts last month, but we are releasing fairly good sized content again on a monthly basis. Every month will present at least 12,000-15,000 word count worth of new content. This might include bonus content in the form of our QOL (Quality of Life) fixes being applied to earlier existing content in the same month.

We're trying to set the expectation on what we can realistically develop in 30 days, while balancing life, school and everything else around the project. Even with that said, what you receive in a given month should be well worth the support at $5+ <3

Our estimated goal for ending January and heading into February will be to officially move onto v0.21's content which is confirmed to include Miki's ep 6 route content and we're still deciding on which other route episode to include for that month.

Let's check what our plans are to kick off 2024 for the rest of the team!

[~Programming~]

I still have to check what they wish to go by, but for now.. "Programmer" will begin January off with fixing two major bug/issues presented with MA recently. One of which will make many happy and us included, as it's been a long time with it being broken!

The first bug/issue being fixed is the Android mobile support! This will be ready with the rest of v0.20 pt 3's content forward! When talking with Artie and examining what's wrong with our Android exported builds, it would seem our previous programmer in the past had messed with some coding within the mobile section of the Ren'py project is our guess.

The second bug/issue being fixed is the textbox hide ui button (aka the little x button). Currently, if you click it, the button functions and does what it's supposed to.. Hide the textbox ui in order to let players view cg art or any art for a while without anything in the way. The issue is while the textbox ui is hidden, if you click anywhere on the screen besides the check mark icon to return the textbox back to normal. It'll cause the game to crash with an error.

We wanted to get these issues settled right away and it'll be a decent way to test drive the programmers knowledge and skills with solving coding issues for the game.

Then from there, they'll dive right into adding the rest of episode 5 content into the game during the month and we'll play test that, make sure it's functioning as intended with no issues! (Fingers crossed)

(We'd like to introduce more exciting, impactful choices when revisiting earlier content to apply QOL fixes. In some fitting moments, we will be looking into the addition of changing out simple choices for built-in mini-games or other engaging interaction other than simple choices.)

[~CG art~]

MarxeDP & AjoseMP will be working on adjusting some old cg art into the finalized style still, but we're also having them include new animations for some old and new cg art that we'll share during the month!

Of course, we'll also get some new cg art started and shared too! The new art that we're working on will ensure the art team stays ahead of what we release, that way we're not waiting on them to provide us with the art ideally.

We'd love to hear everyone's feedback when it comes to cg art and spoilers. How does everyone feel about us sharing previews of cg art that's months ahead of release date? For example: We have much of the ep 6 route cg art ready already, so new art might be ep 7 route focused and that might include some heavy spoilers. 

I'll look into substar options to see if there's a method to spoiler images at least for now to be safe.

[~Sprite art~]

Lisa will begin 2024 with working on a pretty top secret and highly subjective related sprite... I can't say much about what this entails right now, because I don't want to worry anyone until we can provide concept visuals to really pair up with our in-depth plans with this...

But, just know that it's been something we've been thinking about for a long time for MA and with a lot of considering for how to handle it realistically from a development standpoint without major conflicts with other art.

If our reveal of the concept visuals goes well, it should make a lot of people really happy. There might even be more encouragement for some people who have been on the fence or slightly interested in MA in the past, but put off by something to play the game or support us.

That's all I can share about this topic for now, stay tuned for news on this concept visual reveal later this month!

[~GUI~]

ds-sans is in the middle of finishing up the history/log screen and once that's finished this month. They will then begin work on some adjustments to the textbox ui elements and visuals, cg gallery or title screen assets!

We're inching closer to being finished with the gui, so we're pretty excited with that! ^^ 

[~Ending~]

We have quite a bit of exciting stuff going on for January to not only kick off the New Year! But we also want to prove ourselves with getting things moving along once again in the past 2 months up to this point!

If this is your first time joining along and you enjoy the project, please do consider supporting us on Subscribestar if you aren't already! Plenty of exclusive posts are made, at least 3 new posts every week or more!

Keep yourself informed and updated on development by following Subscribestar notifications or bookmarking our >Guide Post< You can also continue to keep updated through our Itch.io page or Twitter as well!

Be alert! The only websites that are officially ran by myself (Princess Bridget) and Messy Studios working on development of Messy Academy are from the following list below. Any place otherwise is unofficial and they might be impersonating us for their own gain. Avoid payments/donating to other sources as it won't be helping fund further development into our game!

>Subscribestar<
>Pixiv Fanbox<
>Kickstarter<
>Twitter<
>Itch.io<
>Pixiv<

(You can also find our official posts/account on these sites, but due to their nature we won't include links directly.)
>F95zone< (Username: Messy Studios)
>omorashi< (Username: Bridget1999)
>tapatalk< (Username: Messy Studios)

Be alert! The one and only official Discord server for following the Messy Studios team development is this one. >>Discord<< If you've come across any other server impersonating us, be sure to report your findings with me directly and steer other's interested in our video game project away from possibly scam attempts.

~ From all of us at Messy Studios! ~

[~December Development Report~]

Our first official development report hosted on substar! :O I'd like to begin by first saying, a big thank you to everyone who has been helping out in anyway possible with the abdl community in response to the Patreon purge. <3

Thank you to everyone who has decided to support us here on substar and even a few on our pixiv fanbox page! <3

It really does mean a lot to us on the Messy Studios team working on Messy Academy. We've been working on the project for 4 years now with 2 more to go roughly before the base game is complete. We already have DLC content planned and a future project in mind that'd be everything you can expect from the polished quality from MA once it's done and more!

Despite Patreon leaving us in a awkward spot with funding for December and leaving it up to fate as to how funding will look into January. We are still continuing development on MA! It will be a tiny bit rough than we had planned, but please understand that the support we receive during December and January will have a impact on how we proceed with things.

The first thing to be cut from development based on lack of funding would be cg art due to it's expensive costs. Naturally we want to avoid this and our $900 goal on a monthly basis will allow us to easily keep everyone on the team paid and this would cover the cg art each month for new content. 

One last thing before we dive into the rest of this post. We're asking all of our fans, supporters, followers where ever you align yourself. Please be sure to spread the word around the community for others who are looking to follow or support us since the Patreon purge. We've been trying to do our best to reach out to everyone, but there's still some people's comments at times that suggest our messages haven't reached them. Thank you everyone! <3

[~Dev Plans & Story~]

Our plan was to keep the v0.20 series of releases coming along and handle it in a fitting way for supporters past or present during November, but of course now we have no access to any of our past Patreon supporters history due to the purge.

The past few days has been extremely wild, so forgive us for the unsure nature as to what will happen with the rest of v0.20 releases that were planned prior to the purge.

I'll keep it plain and simple, below is roughly our plan with the v0.20 series

v0.20 pt 1 & 2 [Released for public Dec 7-8th]
v0.20 pt 3 [Released for supporters Dec 7-8th]

v0.20 pt 3 [Released for public Dec 14-15th]
v0.20 pt 4 [Released for supporters Dec 14-15th]

v0.20 pt 4 [Released for public Dec 23-24th]

We'll also be doing a short novel xmas themed story featuring Allie & Rosa that's planned for Dec 24th. (This is outside of the game content.)

This is not how we normally do new game version releases. Our goal we strive for heading into 2024 after this is to return things to normal, where v0.21 is planned for roughly late January for supporters only. Then with v0.22 planned around late February, at the same time as v0.22 releasing. v0.21 would become free to the public.

That's how we typically handle supporter vs public free game versions, with the goal of new content every 30-45 days. (This will be easier to handle moving into 2024, since the rest of the game is focused on route episodes, which are a bit smaller than past episodes, but still good sized.)

Bear with us during December into the new year, but we're going to keep posts coming at a steady rate that covers all ranges of our support tiers and benefits. We really want to make sure we don't miss a thing

Let's check with the rest of the team!

[~CG art~]

MarxeDP & AjoseMP have been focusing on updating the cg art in the new style, but there's some new cg scenes in progress coming along for our future content. They've been able to update some stuff during November and while I want to share a in progress preview of the xmas themed short novel featuring Allie and Rosa now, it would ruin the surprise for Christmas. :P

Our plan for December on cg art is to keep getting a few cg scenes updated with some new variants and work on the few cg scenes that's been paid for in the past month or two, but we're waiting until January to see how we proceed with ordering new cg art and how it might impact things.

However, a little teaser for our fans to see some art stuff. Below is how our updated cg scene art style stuff has been coming along. The goal with all of this, is making it so the new art seen on the right, is better matched with the character's sprite art. 

[~Sprite art~]

Lisa has officially wrapped up all of the sprite characters that needed updated! ^^ This includes: Mystery character, John, Sadie, Evelyn. Along with any oc characters we didn't have updated in the new style. (We'll be sharing previews of these sprites during December!)

Sprite art is getting pretty close to being finished for the game! There's a special outfit for cast that's story related, very minor spoiler additions for cast. Both of which should be handled within a month of work. (Possibly January/February.)

From there, it's a 4-5 parent sprites and that finishes all sprite work needed on the game! We're thinking sometime in Spring this will be finished.

During December, Lisa I believe is taking the month off for the holidays.

[~GUI~]

ds-sans finished up the finalized save/load gui screens in November! They're now working on the cg gallery screen and with the upcoming holidays, I don't expect that to be finished this month. If it does however, that brings us to 2-3 gui assets remaining I believe. ^^

We'll be holding off on adding more gui into v0.20 releases, as there's some polish and issues to fix with the new textbox ui and the fancy hide textbox button causing crashes. ^^" Expect v0.21 to have these fixed up and some new gui screens added.

[~Ending~]

There's a lot going on in December with wrapping up our v0.20 release series, trying to reach out to everyone to point them to sub star, a mix of new posts and trying to re-upload some old Patreon posts in a new way. There's a lot of stuff to do still with getting this page exactly how we want it to look and feel, but little by little, we'll rebuild it!

If this is your first time joining along and you enjoy the project, please do consider supporting us on Subscribestar if you aren't already! Plenty of exclusive posts are made, at least 3-4 new posts every week!

Keep yourself informed and updated on development by following Subscribestar notifications or bookmarking our >Guide Post< You can also continue to keep updated through our Itch.io page or Twitter as well!

Be alert! The only websites that are officially ran by myself and Messy Studios working on development of Messy Academy are from the following list below. Any place otherwise is unofficial and they might be impersonating us for their own gain. Avoid payments/donating to other sources as it won't be helping fund further development into our game!

>Subscribestar<
>Pixiv Fanbox<
>Kickstarter<
>Twitter<
>Itch.io<
>Pixiv<

(You can also find our official posts/account on these sites, but due to their nature we won't include links directly.)
>F95zone< (Username: Messy Studios)
>omorashi< (Username: Bridget1999)
>tapatalk< (Username: Messy Studios)

Be alert! The one and only official Discord server for following the Messy Studios team development is this one. >>Discord<< If you've come across any other server impersonating us, be sure to report your findings with me directly and steer other's interested in our video game project away from possibly scam attempts.

~ From all of us at Messy Studios! ~