TLDR

Here's what's new:

• Day 7 - around 11,000 words
• Character movements for Days 1, 2, half of 3, and 7
• An in-game notification for when the flowchart gets updated

Here's what comes next:

• Character movements for all days. So the rest of day 3 and all of days 4, 5, 6 and Bingu and Dave 1 and 2
• Additional sound effects and more frequent music changes
• Day selection tool

Known bugs:

• Skipping through the game with tab or ctrl breaks image movement for some reason, so characters and the background will end up in wrong places. I do not know yet what causes this or exactly how to fix it, but it always resets after a scene break so at least those wrong positions won't be permanent.
• I didn't make many changes to flowchart and its scenes; just one. However, this might cause a problem with an old save. So, if you encounter an error related to something along the lines of ..._flow_.png or a related image not being found, it might be due to that. I don't have a fix for that other than starting a new game or reloading a save from before that scene was added to the flowchart. (An issue like this is part of the reason why I'm working on a day selection tool for the next build. It'll make skipping/restarting easier.)

The longer version

I've mostly been busy with adding character movements for all the days I have so far, which takes a lot of time. It's still a little buggy when skipping through text because the sprite movement can get interrupted by changes in text, but I still consider it an improvement over the extremely static ways characters moved before. I've only been able to do this for days 1, 2 and the first half of day 3, though.

In terms of new story content, day 7 has now been added. This one also has all the intended character movements, sound effects and music changes I intend to have for the whole game at some point. Depending on choices made earlier in the story, this day can be either extremely short, or of intermediate length. It's about 11,000 words in total, but you could end up skipping 3,000 of those depending on the specific playthrough.

Lastly, it's a small addition but there's a little notification at the top left of the screen when the flowchart gets updated now. That way, you'll know when you can check it for updates and at what point your playthrough gets "saved".

Going forward, I mostly plan to improve and fully implement the systems I have now. Most importantly, I'm working on a day selection tool where you can essentially speedrun through all the choices up to a certain point. This will make it easier to get back to the point where you left off in case something ever happens to a save or if something stops being compatible. I'll have to see if I can also code it in a way that you can see which choices you've made in your current playthrough and export and/or save those in some way.

Next to that, I'm still working on adding these character movements for the remaining days (so the rest of day 3 and all of days 4, 5, 6 and Bingu and Dave 1 and 2). Additionally, I'm also reworking the sound and music design so that you'll hear more sound effects and have frequent changes in soundtracks to suit the current mood a little better.

New content will probably be limited to day 8, which will probably be a little shorter than day 7, between 8,000 and 10,000 words. Once I'm done implementing all these things, I'll focus more on adding new story content. So the update after the next update will probably contain new days for Dave and Bingu and thus give more development for the main story and their individual histories.

I'm hoping to have the next update out somewhere in January, but no promises. After that one, it will probably take 2-3 months to develop the next major update.

So, in short, I'm still working on improving the fundamental systems while adding small bits of story content. Once I'm done with that, I'll focus on story and character development.