What's been going on lately + Art update (Patreon)

Hey all,I'm sure many of you, especially those who don't frequent the Discord, will have noticed the lack of activity from me recently. I apologize for the lack of communication, as it has been a rough time for me in real life since the beginning of the year. However, I plan to correct that moving forward. This post will have a bit of rambling by me, so if you're not interested, please feel free to just look at the TLDR.TLDR: Some of the older artwork in the game was (comparatively) doo-doo, and it made me averse to working on it. Expect some major sprite overhauls moving forward.Alright, now getting into it a bit more seriously. Since releasing the last update, I found myself having trouble sitting down and working on parts of the game, namely the script writing and artwork, and I wasn't sure why.At first, I figured it was just burnout, and that it would pass, but that wasn't the case. Even more curiously, I was still enjoying drawing and writing, and finding it fulfilling for other projects.So that left me the question of "Why?"Well, the answer to that came one evening when I sat down, opened up the file for Tirria's in game sprite, and just took a long look at it. Before I even really knew what I was doing, I was already sketching improvements and changes to the art. After a stream of finalizing the changes, and getting feedback, I suddenly realized something. I was excited to work on her story again, and continue writing new material for her.

Oftentimes, you might hear programmers or developers talk about "technical debt", which occurs when shoddy or haphazard programming in a project causes issues down the line in development, and takes extra time to go back and fix it.For this game, however, I guess you could call this "artistic debt". No matter how well I draw a scene, or write a dialogue, if the sprites for the characters are looking flat and lifeless, then I felt this strange disconnect, almost a feeling of shame. Hence, it's time to correct the problem.

So what does all this actually mean for the game? Well, the coming update, version 0.075, might take a little longer to come, but it's going to include a whole host of art changes to characters introduced at the very beginning of the game. I'm going to include the changes I've made so far to Alice and Tirria with this post, to give you guys an idea of just how big these changes are going to be. A few other characters will be receiving updates as well, but I'm not 100% certain on just which characters, and how much of a change they'll be getting.

As always, thank you so much for your patience and support, and please look forward to more frequent communication and updates in the coming future.

-Dagotto