Thanks for all the words of support. It’s both encouraging (and a little terrifying) to see all the people still waiting on us. We’re doing our best to keep things moving along so that this will become a reality someday.

Anyways, since a lot of you fine people have offered us help with programming or money, I wanted to address that.

Programming wise we’re working in Ren’py, so 99% of our code is just Ren’py calls around text. The hardest part is keeping the labels straight and just getting all the info in. Mostly its just time consuming. Right now I think our programming side is well covered, but if life happens we’ll definitely reach out to you all in the community. Thanks.

Monetary support is a different matter. We’re really really humbled and thankful for the offers of financial support, but that’s something we can’t accept. ZUNs copyright rules specifically forbid us from asking for donations for this project, or making something like a kickstarter. He views (correctly in my mind) that crowdfunding isn’t really in the ‘doujin spirit.’ So we just can’t accept money for this project.

The other issue is money really wouldn’t help us finish faster. None of us are professional developers, so five, ten or even twenty thousand dollars wouldn’t really give us the kind of financial ability to just quit our jobs and work on this full time. I’m working on my own plans to be able to write full time, but if I become a published author before this is done I’ll be the luckiest man alive. LT is in a similar position.

Thank you again for all your support. If there is anything the community can do can get this game into your hands faster, we’ll be sure to let everyone know. For now simply knowing there are people still interested despite our failures at project management is heartening.

(LT Edit: To be perfectly clear, I’m not pursuing a career in writing.  Not yet, anyway.  Maybe if I’m struck by incredible inspiration someday.  Until then, I think my life of salaryman-ness continues.)

So we missed the deadline I set for us. Entirely my fault too. I assumed we could keep at breakneck speed, but reality is a little more harsh. For example LT got a real job, which is great for him, but slows down writing considerably. I’ve lost my drive twice, and found that editing a novel is infinitely more difficult then writing one, especially if your job goes into overdrive. We have however made a great deal of progress, and I wanted to share what’s happened on the writing side, and what we’re planning for the future.

First I should explain what we’ve completed. The Reimu and Alice paths are done. The Flandre path is almost done. And we’ve started in on the “secret” and Patchouli paths. All together we’ve probably completely 3/5ths of what we were aiming for since our last post, and we have much more solid outlines of what we want to finish. Graph has also made massive strides with the remaining artwork, which he’ll probably explain more in detail in his own post.

What do we have left to do? Well finishing those last routes, programming it all together, and then a lot of editing. How will we handle all that? That’s something we’re still discussing with ourselves, and we’ll probably end up asking those people who are still interested in the project as well. I have a few ideas, but making a big deal about them when we still need to finish the routes is kinda foolish.

We’ll continue to keep you informed as we polish off routes, and when our programming starts in earnest.

I’ve started doing CGs for that part of the story. Please look forward to ESR in 2015!

Graph here. So, here’s my plan for my part in ESR for the next few months.

I decided not to try imitating the style of my old art when finishing up the remaining Event CGs. I consider this project a training exercise of sorts for myself, and using all the tricks I’ve learned in the past few years makes for the best practice, rather than going back to a style I probably won’t use again.

If I’ve got time at the end– and there probably will be a good deal of testing and QC to do after the writing deadline in June– I’ll redo the old character art, and perhaps the first round of CGs. Otherwise, we’ll make do with what we’ve got. I’m sure you guys will agree that this has gone on long enough!

I’ve also decided to upgrade the screen resolution of the game to 1280×720. Just small enough to let us use some of the old art if we need to. Have a taste!

So! What have we done with the last year or so?

Mostly suffered at our various jobs. As the staff has expanded and (mostly) contracted our time to work on the project has suffered as anyone still following us probably knows. However, we haven’t been completely idle. After a long suffering, we completed the first route, the Alice route. It’s not 100%, since we have some fillers and a whole lot of editing to do, but the lines are done and the plot is something we’re happy with. And that’s honestly the hardest part when it comes to work.

Now were focusing on the other four routes. There’s a lot to go there, but with Alice filled in, we’ve got a lot to work with. In fact we’ve got enough to work with that I’m going to give an actual deadline. We’ll be done with the major path routes at the end of June.

What will that mean for the game itself? Sadly we’ll still have a lot of work to do then, just like we have a lot of work to do for Alice still. But it will be editing, coding and polishing work, not creative writing work. Stay tuned to hear from us then, because we’ll be looking into getting more outside help to get us through the final stretch.

Until then, we’ll keep pounding away at our keyboards. November’s probably going to be a wash, (oh hi NaNoWriMo) but LTalon and I will keep moving forward no matter what. I hope to be posting again here with good news as soon as I can.