It's time for the 7388 monthly progress report! As you can see by comparing last month's image with this month's image, progression has been painstakingly slow. I honestly feel as if getting the initial setup off the ground always takes the longest—I try to ensure that things are well-planned in the beginning so the remainder of development can be nice and smooth.

With that being said, let's get into the one category we can show good progress on: the artwork! Specifically, the sprites!
Art

In a moment of frustration, I thumbnailed pretty much every sprite in a single night. This image includes three out of five of the sprited characters, with the remaining two being spoiler characters that cannot be shown.

Merope's sprites are, of course, just remakes of the sprites she had for the proof of concept, but Diana and Yulia's are new. Speaking of Yulia, this will be the first time she's ever been mentioned by name publicly; she is a new character that was not present in the original drafts for 7388, the "friend" mentioned in the public summary on the teaser site.

Merope's sprite may earn an art stream soon, and so may the others. We'd like to make Merope's stream in particular public! By the time this progress report is available to everyone, it will likely have already happened, so if you're a subscriber who's reading this early, keep your eyes peeled for the announcement!

Writing
I'd also like to give a special mention to the writing even though the progress bar did not visibly even so much as nudge. There are new things that happen in the world of LLMs every day to the point where I'm just going to have to accept I may not be able to cover every base. Just a few days ago I learned there are researchers who successfully carried out a dangerous cyberattack using a Google Gemini exploit. Isn't that scary?

I'm never sure how to end these posts. Thanks for reading! See you next month! It's so humid here I'm melting.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the very first Monthly 7388.loving(Grace) Progress Report!

Starting from now until 7388's release, we'll be keeping everyone updated on how far 7388 has gotten, including any pictures we can share! These progress reports will be posted just about everywhere we can slap them, but we highly recommend subscribing to the newsletter so you don't miss a single one!

With that being said, let's get right into it!

It's very early on in 7388's development still, so the most we have as far as writing goes is an in-progress outline. 7388 is a hard sci-fi mystery title that also takes place in a real world location. This combination of factors requires significant amounts of research that must be carried out very early on so that a major research error does not harm the plot. We particularly wish to be careful when it comes to discussing LLMs, as a lot of misinformation has been circulating about them as of late.

As it stands, the only portion of the outline that has been completely written out is an ending. You know what they say: if you're stuck, write the ending first! We expect the outline to get filled out over the course of August.

Fun fact: one of the things I have to read is a fanfic. Yes, I'm completely serious.

If you subscribe to the Patreon or the Subscribestar, you know that we've already completed every character design at this point. Something we've also been doing is ironing out the art direction that 7388 will take, which is another thing that Patrons/Subscribers have already seen a test of (if you're curious as to what that might be, we're using the Monthly Art as testing grounds!).

The next step in the art category is to start working on the sprites for the major characters. These consist of three fairly large (but not too large) sprites with multiple poses. We aim to have at least 4 poses each.

(And, tangentially related to art, the key art is being drafted! 7388 will probably have multiple key arts.)

At this time, 7388's development has not gotten far enough to reach the programming or music stages.

If you are familiar with our previous titles, you may be wondering why there is a "music" category as we typically use stock soundtracks. We plan to have custom tracks made for 7388, which would be a first for our studio. The budget for this is not very big, so the music section could be filled quickly or not at all…but we'd like to have something!

This concludes the first ever Monthly 7388 Progress Report. If you'd like to support 7388's development, please check out our Patreon or Subscribestar—every tier gets to see these progress reports one week early! Also, if we get more money, we can polish 7388 more!