Hello world, KS here!
We're over half way through 2026 now, how fast time flies. I hope you're all doing well.

The development for New Horizon 0.5 is progressing. I would say it's more than half way done now. What exactly did I do in the past two months? Mostly refining old script, fleshing out and finalizing world and character settings, and game UI improvements.

In short:

• Refining and finalizing world and character settings

• Refining old scripts, event triggers and point system

• Refining game UI with dozens of newly added functions

• A little bit of script writing for new content

Story & Settings

You probably wouldn’t believe me when I tell you that I made 4 updates so far for New Horizon without a very clear and finalized world and character settings. Yeah, I can’t believe myself either. A lot of the settings have also slowly evolved over the course of 3 years. When I have some new inspirations, I tend to want to implement them into the game. So there are many new things and old things all scattered across the settings.

That has created some plot holes and it also makes creating future versions more complicated as well. Therefore, I decided to organize it and finalize the overall picture of the story and settings right now, before it gets out of control. I have spent most of the past few months doing that in my free time, and refined the world settings, main characters settings and support characters settings. It was a big undertaking but I’m happy that I finally managed to get it done. 

What this means is that for the future, I will have an easier time writing and making the update. I also have to patched up a few plot holes in the old content, refining it before I can work on the new content.

I also fixed some inconsistency regarding text formatting. For example, putting Sigh into ** as it is more of an action than actual words that characters say. I also changed internal thoughts from italicized text into (brackets.) I also rearranged the chapter designations, simplified the point system, event trigger conditions, etc

There’s always the thoughts like “I should’ve have done this 2 years ago,” but I didn’t really have an idea of how I really want this game to go. A lot of times, it really requires time, and patience to build something truly meaningful. I not saying it meant nothing when I first started. I had a vague vision for what I want it to be, but as time goes on and my experiences accumulate, that goal or perhaps how I do things, have shifted ever so slightly.

I also plan to give each girls a few more different hairstyles, and more outfits.

Game UI

I have greatly improved the game UI and I have added in many useful functions to make the experience better hopefully.

• Interactive buttons and menus.

• New language select screen upon launching the game for the first time.

• Help page from main menu now has introductions about all of the functions in the game.

• Save page: you can now delete or rename any save you want; added button that skips 10 pages at once.

• Hint system: audio hints and hints that display above choices that indicate the better choice. You can turn them off in Options.

• Quick menu: new and improved quick menu now sits at the right edge of the screen. You can turn on its auto-hide feature as well as compact mode.

• New text size slider with live preview.

• Profile & Codex: profile page for the 5 main heroines and codex page for every character, lore and faction that updates as you progress the story.

• Extra: the new Extra page contains the gallery replay, music room and a game progress tracker that tells you how much story content you have unlocked.

• Per-save choice tracker: a menu that tracks your choices throughout the game that is save dependent. Access it from quick menu.

• New Quick Time Event (QTE) system: There are now 5 different QTE types in the game, optimized for both PC and mobile devices.

There are still a few things I want to implement, but it takes time. For now, these new additions would improve the experience more than enough.

As I've said before, this update is mainly focused on overall improvements of the experience of the game. New content might not be as much as previous updates, but these improvements will go a long way for the development of New Horizon in the future, I hope you can understand.

Lastly, thank you for being patient. I know I'm not good at being on time for most things, but I am working on the game all the time regardless.

Sincerely, KS