Hello everyone! It has been a long and very hot summer indeed, and one with very little activity on our end, unfortunately. The departure of one of our writers back in May left us bare and we decided to pause our Patreon for months in order to hunker down and plan our whole game through and through to try and avoid this happening again in the future.

Luckily, we gained a new writer with that occasion (introduced in the post above). Since then, he's had time to adapt to our team and learn how the game and project operate, and he's even managed to write some new content, which we hope you'll enjoy reading through in this new version!

Speaking of hot summers, you might notice a familiar figure working some sweats in that picture. Garreth has gotten new content for you to play through! And with this occasion, we have also retconned his previous dating content, because it gave him a personality we were not comfortable with (and neither were you, as we heard your voices on it).

On top of that, we're also adding the first bits of playable content with Cedrik, the water drake lots of people wanted to spend more time with but never got the chance to! You can now choose to spend time with him during the free time segments.

But wait, there's more! Throughout the summer, Rriik has added a multitude of new features that were missing from the previous versions and which will hopefully bring the game experience much closer to visual novels made in Ren'Py. These additions include a (skippable) splash screen with content disclaimers, a loading animation (currently only used when saving the game) gradual text reveal for the game's textbox, a more streamlined options menu with new options (like turning off confirmation dialogs for save file interactions), audio framework improvements and more! You can find the full changelog down below.

And lastly, we recognize that the entire existing content is missing a lot of audio and sprite expressions/side images. Which is why we're going to start parsing through all the game's content and fill these blanks out, beginning with this update. For now, we've added default sprites for most of the characters that still didn't have one, and made minor background additions (such as bringing back the hotel lobby reception desk background, this time with multiple layers to allow proper sprites in-between).

We hope this update will make up for our recent absence, and we'll continue to work on improving identity as well as adding new content for you to enjoy!

Changelog

- Made subtle changes to Garreth's first date, fully rewrote his second date and removed his third date for now.
- Added Cedrik's first date.
- Added more backgrounds and sprites across the story and fixed numerous typos.

- Added functionality to gradually reveal text in the textbox.
- Added fixed text speed modifiers for some of the lines of the story that previously had them in Ren'Py.
- Added move transitions for character sprites.
- Added character side image functionality.
- Added loading animation when saving and moved a large part of the saving process to a separate thread.
- Added splash screen with content disclaimers.
- Modified the options menu layout to display elements under a list.
- Added option to adjust text reveal speed under text options (instantaneous speed is also possible by dragging the slider fully to the left).
- Added option to disable save file confirmation dialogs (overwrite/reload/delete) under gameplay options.
- Improved audio framework to allow simultaneous playback of multiple channels on the same main bus.
- Fixed an issue with the audio framework which caused tracks that had a start delay to not play at all.

Notes:

- Due to many feature additions and internal changes, saves might misbehave. Starting a new game is recommended if that happens.
- Sometimes audio may not behave properly, particularly when skipping or clicking rapidly. Simply save and load back up and the issues should be solved.