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! ~

Hey everyone! ^^ I hope December is treating you all well so far! Typically I only do the monthly development report post for the public and maybe something else, but just for December, I think it's important to keep everyone informed.

In case you missed it, Patreon purged a ton of abdl content creators from their platform about 2 weeks ago by this point? Many creators ended up going to sub star or fanbox, etc. I'm sorry for repeating this for those who have heard enough about the situation, but I just want to let it be known for anyone following us through other platforms and reading this.

If you were following or supporting Messy Academy on Patreon. We have no access to anything from Patreon anymore since 2 weeks ago, our account was deactivated by their support with zero warning. What I mean by that is, typically they send a email and put your account on halt, reach back out to them and do what they ask in order to fix whatever the issue is. (That didn't happen to myself or other creators, it was the same email excuse and they didn't want to hear it any further, waving many of us off.)

What I'm trying to get at is that, if you were following or supporting us on Patreon. If by some odd reason it shows you're still supporting our Patreon page, contact their support team for a refund. We can't even login to the account to access our tax information for the upcoming tax season. Any access we had to patrons, messages, information, posts and anything to do with Patreon is gone.

If you wish to support Messy Academy and the team, our main hub area is on sub star. If you've never heard of it before, it's very similar to Patreon in layout and purposes for content creators.
https://subscribestar.adult/messyacademy

[Support, goals and thanks!]

On a note about our sub star and support, I'm happy to announce that we're officially halfway to our monthly goal! A little over it actually, but we hope that with the planned releases for this month for both public and supporters in mind. That it'll help boost that as well, as we'd like to move into January and provide new content on a monthly basis!

I'd like to personally say thank you everyone! <3

I know our development has been in a rough place for a while and we were in the process of just getting out of that rough spot when the whole Patreon situation hit us. >.< We still have a lot to do to prove ourselves as we move into 2024 even once v0.20's content is fully out this month, but we hope to provide more quality content.

With the mention of support. I'd like to warn everyone now that our ideal plan into 2024 is to continue development uninterrupted. But, if by chance we can't reach our goal. The first thing that it'd impact is new cg scenes being added to new content. CG art is the most expensive aspect of our team's costs and naturally they're these spotlight moments in-game.

I don't say that to scare anyone, but it's just to be mindful of how funding can impact development and what we can provide for everyone. Again, our dream goal is not to even let this outcome become a reality as 2024 hits, but it'll depend on myself, the team and the amazing support from our fans.

Huge thank you to everyone for being patient with us and being more than understanding in the past with us! <3

[v0.20 content and the future!]

Now, for the moment everyone has been very patiently awaiting! What's the status on the content for December?

We were hoping to get v0.20 pt 3 released during this past weekend, but there were a few factors that prevented us from getting it out. Besides a bit of bug/issues fixing to ensure we don't make our list of problems bigger into 2024.. ^^" One of the cg scenes seen within this content is nearly done and should be sent to me.. Honestly, at any moment this week.

Normally I wouldn't wait for cg art and hold things back, since it's not a problem to replace temp art placeholder images with the finished ones. This cg scene however, includes animated variants that wasn't originally planned and so we had to make some on the fly writing tweaks to the script in this one area to match up with the visuals better.

It might seem silly, but I think first impressions of new content is fairly important as well. That isn't to say we should purposely delay things all the time, but in this case with the scene in question. I know it'd leave a better impact on the player, if it came across in the ideal way vs being meh.

Okay, so without my wordy sea of text hiding anything... Below is our plan! Good news mixed with a little eh?! News!

v0.20 pt 3 for supporters is releasing tonight! v0.20 pt 1 & 2 will become free to the public fans also tonight! (pt 1 & 2 are simply rolled into one download)

v0.20 pt 1 & 2 will feature two scenes that begin Episode 5 for the public, about 30 minutes of content give or take.

v0.20 pt 3 will feature one new scene that continues from where pt 2 left off, about 30 minutes of content give or take.

Now, you're asking yourselves... "What?! Wasn't pt 3 supposed to have like 3-4 scenes?"

Yes, as mentioned we're waiting on the cg scene stuff I talked about. We know it'll be done this week and so supporters will also receive the next 3 scenes that are supposed to be part of v0.20 pt 3 this weekend. We wanted to provide what content we could in the mean time, you can play stuff now or hold off for the other scenes if you wish. (The other 3 scenes provide around 30 minutes of content as well, on top of the one provided tonight. It's a big episode... ^^" )

Next! What happens after this weekend?

v0.20 pt 4 is roughly expected for later in the next week, probably... Friday since releases earlier in the week are rough for me to do typically. This last part of v0.20 will feature 3 scenes (About 45 minutes of content.) with a brief ending moment that'll leave many possibly tossing around theories and hype for the future content to see how the main story unfolds.

We'll then begin to pace out the content from pt 3 & 4 to the public, but as we head into January. Just understand that it'll be a wait until out next public version of the game is out. v0.21 is ideally ready by the end of January for supporters only and this will begin our typical expectations between supporter vs public content.

(In other words, while the public has v0.20 in full to enjoy. Supporters will have v0.21 content exclusively for January. Then around late February, supporters gain the exclusive v0.22 content and the public will receive access to the past v0.21 content a month after it was exclusive to supporters. Hope that makes sense, that's how we typically handle the difference for being a supporter vs public content for benefits.)

[Wrap it up!]

This post is a bit too long.. ^^" Time to end things!

I've kind of answered this one before, but last month when we still had Patreon and access to everything. We were trying to provide v0.20 in full to anyone who had supported us in the past, but clearly we have no records to prove to us who supported what or if they did, making that plan kind of fall through... >.< Not that we or any other content creators expected the outcome from Patreon, a few were lucky with grabbing their data from Patreon before being banned. We weren't so lucky.

Knowing that, we want to ensure we still provide v0.20 in full to the public in a timely fashion, faster than we normally provide content between supporter vs public releases to make it up for Patreon's actions... But, please understand this isn't expected with content, come January 2024. We rely heavily on support and while we make time and enjoy communicating with everyone that loves our game regardless. We also ensure we provide fair exclusive benefits for our supporters, because the funding is what helps fuel the rest of our team's skills to provide new content for the game as a whole.

That said, we hope we're handling things as fairly as we can given our situation and with the momentum being seen with v0.20's content so far, we don't want to let that slow down and run into other issues for development any further. We owe it to many of you and we hope to prove that heading into 2024! <3

~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! ~