The site tells me I should make a post. Here is that post that I should make.

Romance!
A date, a party, drinking hot tubing, hair styling, pranks, and nice discussions with grandma about the doomed earth. And Kissing. A lot of people kissing. This update has a lot.

The Story and Paths
Chapter two pretty big. It more that triples the word count. There is a continuation of the first date update for BOTH the scenes where Dawn is mad and Dawn feels like kissing. Hopefully, both paths are rewarding. If you have a save file where Dawn stormed off it is not a game over but it is a more challenging path.

There is a bonus scene that we added in because we just thought it would be nice.

Playtime is a tricky thing. Bee's Knees did a final playthrough of the game in about an hour.  This is not her first playthrough as she playtested segments as she programmed it. Playing the game optimally with foreknowledge, you too can finish the game in an hour. She also avoided playing spin the bottle. An auto-forward playthrough of the game took three hours. I think there is a good amount of meet and enough fat on those bones, for the people who want that.

The Art
We projected that we would need ninety renders for character expressions and actions. I made closer to two hundred fifty. That's 90 into 250. I think the quality really shows. I cut writing where I think the visuals do a good job of storytelling. I want to use every part of that Visual Novel name.

I see these drawn visual novels with "30+ assets" on finished games and I have a spectrum of feelings about it.

The Sound
There are sounds now! For the previous two updates, we had some trouble with some of ren'py's programming quirks. Such as the volume mixer not fucking working and the loop tags not mattering. 

We have sound now!

For the previous two versions of the game, there was one song, as a treat. We have expanded that to I think eight songs and a few sound effects. It took two whole damn days but that is boring programming shit. The point is we fucking got it in there!
The next goal is to figure out how I'm going to get Paint It Black in the game for chapter five. I want it so bad!

The Lore
Why is the sum going out? Why does the player character have to do something about it? What does Grandma know? What about plot holes or alternatives to rushing a single student into a committed relationship? Why is there short green hair on the cover image, when I don't have short green hair?

All these questions and more are answered if you care. It isn't all straight boring lore. There are a lot of character beats between the player and grandmother for people that just want to talk to grandma or get their money's worth.

For people who don't care. Don't care, here to date and see cute girls. For you, my special, lovely, reader. You can skip it. If you don't need an explanation, blessed creature, you don't need an explanation.

TLDR Update notes
-15,000 more words!
-13 more scenes (PLUS special bonus scene)
-1-3 hours of playtime
-Continued paths for both routes
-Over two hundred more renders
-Sound! 8~ songs and sound effects
-Green Hair
-Lore! (avoidable)

When's the next update?
I'll be excited for a moment when people start asking me this. Then, I will as annoyed as everyone else. There are only two kinds of answers:

1) Some boring shit that you probably shouldn't care about.

2) Never, followed by some boring shit.

Boring shit includes dates. No one likes dates.

The boring shit answer for this is that I can "reliably" write 500-1000 words a day. I have a light outline to be approved and workshopped by the rest of Sweet Potato Games. Once we outline and events are approved, I can start writing. The game writing will be edited and approved in batches of 3000 words. Now that everyone shares programming duties, it is not longer a time restraint.

Making assets for the game got down relatively quickly. I made easily three times the amount of assets than what we expected. Fullscreen renders can be done around 12 a day. character assets can be made thirty a day.

We have a goal of doing the outlining meeting this week.

Editorial
I would prefer if ren'py games updated automatically. There are positives to updating manually, though. Like you get to read my funny, funny posts. Then, you know that you updated. There are games on steam that I hear about an update but I don't know if it happened automatically or if I have to push a button somewhere, or where I would find said button.

Itch's app does update files but then it gets kind of confused about what file to play, so you are still playing detective and looking for numbers.

When I updated the game, I forgot to double-check the changes to the game page. If I had, I would have caught the lack of OUR NEW TRAILER two days early. Haven't seen the trailer? I won't make you go to another page.

Also, I spent too much time changing the cover Gif


Hey, fellow devs! I'm updating my Visual Novel Database post with Lemma Soft Forums. https://thesugarray.itch.io/romancing-the-sun/devlog/217885/joining-a-list-of-vi...

Be excellent to each other
-Ray Richards, ThoughtRay