Week 33, 2026 - development update (Patreon)

Hi folks!

The middle of the month came unexpectedly quickly - with a bit of a delay, I'm coming back with this month's devlog.

The next update

The main thing I'm tackling is obviously the v0.58 update. It's shaping up to be the biggest update we've released yet, standing at the moment just three words shy of 20k (!) words of new scenes. The bulk of it is the updates for the Guðrún, Lake and Jørgen routes - the new content for the first two is 100% done, and now I'm finishing the last two scenes for Jørgen's part of the update.

There's a lot inside, including another fun exploration scene with most of the cast, accessible through almost every route, and the rework of the whole thread about the key on Day 1 - something I talked about in a dedicated devlog about two weeks ago. The rework was already released with the preview build, along with Guðrún's update, and soon it'll be out for all patrons - and added to v0.57 public builds too.

There are some renders from Roborak I'm waiting for - I hope they'll arrive soon, otherwise I'll have to use placeholders for some of the backgrounds.

Lake's side story

Tentatively called The Waves. The first build is fully written, but it's not yet ready to ship. Haku is working on the UI for it, and once that's done, it'll be ready for a release! It's definitely text-focused, more of a novelette than a modern VN, so we decided on retro styling for it - 4:3 aspect ratio, low resolution, fullscreen text mode. The first build will be short, about 4k words, but I'm making every word count - it's a bit of an experiment and I'm curious how it'll work out.

I'm extremely excited for this, as I think it features some of my best writing yet, concise and purposeful.

Art

Following the poll, I'm going with fewer commissions - but bigger ones. This month I've commissioned two pieces: one more on a whim, the other - a key piece.

Ghost is drawing a piece for the music jam scene from the previous update. I thought the scene itself needed something visual alongside music - now it will have a full illustration.

I managed to get a slot for a special piece with Lake, Guðrún, Jørgen and Arvo together, with an artist I'm sure you all recognise - he's drawn for other VNs too, and I couldn't be more excited to have him on board for this piece - and perhaps more!

There are also two (!) different NSFW sequences I got from Bakemonoy for Rune's route last month - I can't wait to show them to you, but at the same time, I don't want to ruin the magic of seeing them in the VN first - for now I'm keeping them on my hard drive while pondering what I should do with them.

I've also merged Roborak's design for the textbox with the default one for a clean but custom UI, it's a small thing but a nice touch! You can see it in the attached screenshot.

That's all for now! I'll be back soon with the update ✨- Keo