Hello, citizens of Ultraviolet City! It’s been a while hasn’t it?

I must say, keeping the birthday schedule for the devlogs was a great idea. Maybe I should add the housekeeper’s birthdays onto the list?

Anyways, we got a lot of progress to share!

But before we start, happy birthday to Arthur Schmidt! Our beloved protagonist of the game! He’s gotten a few new gifts this time around!

(Note: if this post ended up being on December 13, sorry for the delay!)

Writing

Now, I will announce some exciting news!

All of the drafts for the beginning, the routes and the end of the game have been finished!

That means we are moving onto the script writing! Finally!

At the moment, I’m writing for Sara’s route. While also checking over the script related to the beginning of the game to make sure the assets match the words written for it.

Speaking of, the feedback and proofreading for the beginning part of the script have also been swell!

Due to the fact the game is a visual novel, I ended up writing the script not on one single document file but separating them based on sections of the game. Whether it’s on a scene or a day in a route or even for interactions.

Surprisingly, I haven’t set a word limit for the script yet. At the current moment, the word count is 15,800+ words! (That is with additional director notes for the readers like the feedback members and our programmer, Patata!)

Now it could be rookie numbers right now. I bet it would go higher and it kind of scares me a bit, haha.

Now, we’re going to move over to the second section…

Art

There has been a huge focus onto ui design and background lately. Sprite work have also been done for new characters in the game but their expressions haven’t been changed yet.

Speaking of sprites! We would love to share a couple of new things related to Arthur (our birthday boy!)

Here he is without his jacket, hair pin, tie and backpack! Quite…simple.

You might not even think he is based on Strings when you see him with this look, haha

And then here he is with his outdoor look! And tada! He got glasses now! What a charming guy!

We are also going to reveal his bedroom! This area will be commonly used before and after you spent a day with a route character! Or choose to stay at home.

It’s slightly a work in progress but let me know your thoughts of it!

Oh and in case you ask, I will work on assets based on what part of the script I finished. For example, I’m not going to work on Blake’s bedroom because there is no mention of it in the script for Sara’s route.

Regarding the ui, the dialogue box from the April fools version will mostly be kept the same in the official game. There will be extra features for the final game and while it’s still good on paper at the moment, we need to understand how to make it functional in code and if it even needs animations from my side.

Speaking of the April Fools versions…

A new patch update for the April Fools version (version 0.1.2) will be available!

Edit: it’s released!

You heard it folks! We are going to update the build for April Fools!

You might be confused as to why we even update TODAY (or tomorrow) of all times. Thought it was suitable since Arthur is in the game and it is his birthday today! Thought it would be a nice surprise after months of no news!

Here are the list of changes we made;

New feature:

• You can check dialogue history by clicking the right click button of your mouse! Pretty nifty feature for the official game!

Bugs and Errors:

• Fixed misspelling and grammatical errors

• Fixed a bug where the secret ending starts again rather than sending you back to the main menu. You can click on the star to see it again!

We will publish the build after testing. For now, we are going to focus on the main game. We won’t be coming back to this build unless there is a game breaking bug or more misspelling errors...

That is all! Quite a long one! Don’t expect the next few ones to be as long though!

See y’all on January 3rd (which is Blake’s birthday)!

~ Roses, from the PB dev team