Hello! Apologies for the slow posting here.

I spent most of April fleshing out the overworld with various small minigames and side attractions, including some basic cooking and room decoration mechanics, a secondary fishing minigame at the river, a few restaurants, and an aquarium you can visit to view fish caught from the beach fishing activity!

I also set up a 'Challenge Battle' activity in a local gym, in which you can play and try to complete various unique combat scenarios--a mix of actual challenges like winning within a certain time limit or beating a boss without taking damage, as well as a few sillier things that mess with the game's mechanics. The rewards for the most difficult challenges will likely just be decorative trophies you can put in Saki's room, so you won't be missing much if no-hitting isn't really your thing. :)

I always find toying with mini-games to be a lot of fun, so I try to save making them for when I feel like I need a break from the boring parts of development. Unfortunately, my holiday ended in May, and I got back to working on coding and spriting the story cutscenes for Chapter 2.

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At the time of writing, I'm about 70% of the way through making Chapter 2's story cutscenes now. I was able to make this chapter much faster than I did Chapter 1, which feels nice.

Chapter 2 is where the game's overworld fully opens up, so once I'm done with it, I might pass a demo around to some friends to get feedback on the writing and gameplay up that point. It'll be my first time showing off the 'actual' game to anyone, because it'll be the first time the 'actual' game would be playable. And it's only taken six years...!

I've tried to set myself a goal of having Part 1 finished by around July of next year. I'm not entirely sure if it's doable or not, but I think having some kind of vague imagined deadline might help whenever I find myself procrastinating or overscoping. Too much time can be a bad thing for creative works, sometimes...

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I've also done a little work improving some of the existing songs on the soundtrack, and uploaded two new tracks to my Youtube channel--Livio's boss theme, and the 'Otherworld' battle theme. They're my two favorite tracks I've made so far.

A big motivation for me get through making the story cutscenes is actually just because I'm really excited to start composing battle themes for the later boss fights..

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...But that's all for now. Thank you for reading!

(PS. Some bonus modern full-body art for Yuri and Saki that is unfortunately squished on this site. Click the link to see what it's meant to look like...)