This week has been all about writing. I've just finished transferring the story into renpy script and doing all the choice and variable structures. I'm pretty sure this is the biggest update I've done, it currently sits at just over 21,000 words. For context, the last update was about 15,500. Just the story, without any audio or visual aspects included are sitting at 1200 lines of renpy script. I suspect this means it will be a longer than 4 week cycle to complete it. I'm one week in now, not counting the week between the EA0.35 and public release of 0.36, as that was all about fixing stuff under the hood. I did toy with the idea of cutting it in half and leaving it on a cliff-hanger about two thirds of the way through... and I still might depending on what happens. But I think my preference is to release the whole completed episode in one go. This could be a good opportunity for me to get to grips with the "less is more" approach to sprites and animations. Probably not the best update for it because there are something like 11 secondary characters and 3 separate combat sequences involved in this update.

It also has 2 main characters involved, Lyra & Alice. This accounts a lot for the length as you are spending time with them, on their own and together.

I've included a few unprocessed images of those side characters in this update - usual disclaimer, unprocessed means dodgy hands, possible seams showing where the face was manipulated, not upscaled, the female fighters won't have open-toed boots on, might be other weirdness going on as well.

I also found a bit of busywork for me to do. I hadn't realised it and I need to check it, but I think the conversion of some of the darker backgrounds to webp hasn't turned out too well. This seems a common issue with dark images. Upscalers struggle with it as well; something to do with a lack of bit depth meaning the gradients between blacks and greys become very stark. Anyway, I noticed that the camp background in Alice's update looks very pixelated and I'm sure the original wasn't. I'll have to check them all and might have to go back in and replace them with their original jpg versions. Not the end of the world. the jpegs are about 3x the size of webps, but about a third of the size of pngs.