I was gonna make the title "Status Update", or something like that, but sometimes less words speak more succinctly...

Anyway, I'm not gonna waste much time with a pre-amble here, I'll get right to the point. The new update was meant to come out late this month, but we're gonna have to delay it late to the next.

March was an estimate that I set back during the beginning of the update's development, under firm confidence, since I'm usually pretty good at meeting rough deadlines.

Unfortunately, confidence is a weak mushy victim against the iron-fisted rule of nature that is real life and all the responsibilities that come with it. Th- That is, we got busy. We got busy with other projects, and personal responsibilities, and I had to feed my dog...

I figure that I can tide you over with a little breakdown though, on where we're at progress-wise, and how many steps me and Redd got left. I present to you... the five-step plan!

• Step One: The Main Stuff. In other words, everything involving the redesign of YOU the Frog, what we set out to do when we first started this update. This step's been stepped the hell out of, because we've only got like, 2 things left here.
  
  One of the things is updating the Dogcheck screen, the other's redoing one of the stills for the beginning Noyno exposition scene. That particular still, it has a shot of YOU's blue eyes, so obviously we gotta Sonic Adventure-ify that thing by making the eyes green, making it consistent with YOU's current design.
  
  Other than that, everything else involving YOU has been sprited, implemented, and then some. Feels like we're near the finish line.

• Step Two: Optional Sprite Polish. As we're 95% done with all the YOU stuff, we've also been going over various other sprites in the mod, and thinking some of them could use a fixer-upper. Not all of them, there's plenty things that I really don't think are necessary to change. However, there are certain sprites that never quite came out how I wanted them to. Those are the ones we're putting our focus on, bringing them closer to my original intent.
  
  I will be going into more detail on these when the mod comes out and I'll get to write a fancy changelog on it. But in the meantime, here's some of the things we've redone the artwork for.

  1. One of the MOTHERSPAWNs. It's not Worrysome, so that one random Gamejolt commenter can rest easy. Every other MOTHERSPAWN will remain identical.

  2. Opposing King

  3. Seam's clock tower shop

  4. Noyno's battle animation for defending

• Step Three: Mandatory Sprite Polish. This step's on a much smaller scale than the rest, there's not much to do here. Primarily, we wanna look into redoing YOU's walking animation in the Dark World.
  
  The intent here was to create a silly-looking "brave" pose for YOU, which we would then swap out with a more serious pose the closer you got to the end of the mod. However, we've received feedback that the animation looks stiff, and rather odd. And that was from a whole bunch of people, so there's no way we're ignoring this. It'll be redone. We're not sure how yet, but we'll figure it out.

• Step Four: Playtesting. Believe it or not, there's gonna be a lot of it here. YOU's redesign being a couple pixels taller and wider makes a world of difference in completely breaking this game into an unplayable form. Just about every cutscene and room needs to be slightly re-adjusted now, so I'll be meticulous in that sense.

• Step Five: Finishing the new "Writing Style". In the last video I posted for this update, you might've noticed amongst all the stupidly quick cuts a new option to select between two "Writing Styles", Ribbit's writing as it was in 1.5.2, and a revised version that says it'll cut down on some of the dialogue, and rewrite other pieces of it.
  
  The purpose of this is to to accommodate players who didn't like the "1 joke per every 2 lines" method of writing I used to employ, and cutting down on some of the tonal whiplash that occurs here and there. Still, cutting out any of those jokes could be a disappointment to those who liked them, hence why you'll be able to toggle back to 1.5.2's writing at any point via the menu.

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That's the five-step plan! We're currently nearing the end of both Step One and Two simultaneously. And we've got a whole 30+ days to finish all of this... it's a bit daunting, but a lot can happen in 30 days, and I'll be most likely working like an ol' horse on the final two steps. Wish us ol' horses good luck...