A day early on the update, but I'm out tomorrow evening so figured I'd get it done now.

I've finished Alice's event completely. It took a lot longer than I thought it would to do all the sound and music. When I say music, most of it is ambience. It involves layering and gradually changing ambience tracks over time as the weather and environment changes quite a bit. Beyond that there are also quite a few small scenes where they are doing physical things. I think these land better with accompanying sound. Which means sourcing a fair few new sound effects. Usually they have to be converted into mp3 format. Some of them have to have their audio levels adjusted, others need to be cut up. The places that sell these effects often sell a batch of say 10 variations in a single .wav file, so you then need to go in and cut them up into separate files and convert them to mp3 format. I use Audacity to do this, which is a really great free audio editing tool. Very easy to use, very intuitive and it has loads of great features. I did have to edit a few sound effects for length but also fade effects and things like that. I've recently been sourcing effects from Artlist where I have a monthly subscription. Their array of sound effects is great but I've recently started going through what music tracks they have as well and the selection is really good, consistently high quality.

For Emelia's event; about 95% of the sprites are in and about 40% of the sound and music. I'm still rendering the animations for the sex scene, but all the other animations are done and in. I'm going to have to re-do some of the sprites. One of the sprites (which unfortunately also had 3 emotion variants), just wasn't quite right. So my SDXL checkpoint is currently churning out a batch of Emelia's.

Found and fixed a bug causing a critical error in the prologue that was introduced in the last update. I had been doing some tidying up of my character profiles and deleted a couple I thought I had never used, but it turned out I had, once, in the prologue.

I've updated the stat change notifications to include a summary of your current and max possible scores for that state. I've added in a record of what the alignment and money stats are for the MC on his character page as well. It needs some tidying up, but it's in.

I've also re-designed the 'end of content' event. Renpy is designed to run linearly and when it reaches the end of what it has, it dumps you back at the main menu. So that screen was intended to ensure that didn't happen before the player had a chance to save their game. But it was causing confusion. It required player's click the button in the top right and check the contracts and character screens to see if any other content was available and a lot of people weren't picking that up. I had an idea of how to fix this and thought it might be quite easy to implement. It wasn't. Currently when you access those menu screens, pressing the button involves toggles them on and off. But for the end of content I needed the player to end up in that hub screen automatically and to change it so that it is not possible to return to the game, unless you have clicked to access a new event. This is called 'calling' the screen, and it has slightly different rules and functions as to toggling it. I need the access button to be there all the time during normal gameplay, but switched off at end of content. Anyway, long story short... I had to script in different behaviour and tracking for every button in the contracts and character events screen and the homehub. So that took most of my Sunday afternoon. But it's done and now I can deliver a much better user experience.

I expect the early access release to be Wednesday next week. Aside from the stuff detailed above, between now and then I have to re-do Vivian's scenes from Chapter 1 to use her new improved look and transfer over as many character profiles to the newer format character screens as possible and try to add a character profile screen for Vivian as well. If I have any time I'm going to start revisiting some of the older style sprites still in the early game and start replacing them with better ones.

I don't have many screens of the latest update to share with you as I don't like to show too much about the content that is coming, but on my patreon for free members and above there are a couple there + a little sneak peak at a Halloween extra pack I'm very slowly putting together for tier 1+ patrons. I had intended to try to include every character, but I won't have time so I'm aiming for just Sarah and Caitlin to be appearing in it.