Merry Christmas everyone! If you are celebrating or not, I hope you still enjoy these holiday days and take it easy with a cake or two 🍰 Here are Serena and Eiko wishing you some amazing holidays too. Serena heard Eiko was all alone and came for a surprise visit with gifts 😊

I decided to also bundle a progress report here, which is the 2nd one so far (first one is here, it's for patrons only).  I won't repeat too much of the first progress, but so far, this 1 month was... Good. Christmas related activities definitely took a bit of time, and I had covid in the first 2 weeks, but besides that, I've been working hard on Ep4.5. The script/dialogue is much much better now in Episode 1, with lots of problematic or weird choices removed, covid talk gone, changed/removed that old story that was supposed to have gang wars lol etc. I am much happier with Episode 1 script now and I think I managed to fix all loopholes inside of it. Episode 2 still left to do.  Some stuff I won't say here as they are new additions, and some I already said in previous report, so I hope people will enjoy all that when it comes ^^

Last two weeks were on renders focused and they've been extremely tough for multiple reasons. When I started working on remastering them, I quickly realized that my thinking of "replace old characters with new + new lightning" isn't as simple as it sounded in my head. Not only did some of the old scenes load a bit weird (sure, I can still remove charas+ lights myself), but some scenes turned to be... flat out broken. Like bugged broken, that I showcased in my patreon discord channel.   It could be related how my studio used to be broken for a whole year during ep1-3, but whatever the reason is, it makes the old scenes basically useless, meaning I need to make them from scratch. And once I started hitting that roadblock, I asked on my discord server for people to tell me which maps and character clothes they found the best/worst in ep1-3, and I got a ton of responses (if you wish, you can write on this post too!) It turns out a lot of ppl noticed some worse looking maps, mostly the bad textures (like that airplane with Koko, metro with Avis), and I took those comments to heart. Why use the exact same old map that people dislike if there might be a new map available now, as hs2 isn't brand new like back then with limited choices? Same with clothes. For some stuff I might not have a replacement, but those are quite rare (supermarket possibly).

So I am doing exactly that, I am checking the map/scenes options now and looking at what can be improved. I am also commissioning maps (aka using the patrons support to pay modders to make maps for me), and you will see a few maps first time ever in my ep4.5, never seen before in any other VN due to it 👀
I've also had some people actually go through my game a bit more in depth (and not just looking at the girls and butts), and even they saw multiple plotholes which just proves even more that my decision to fix old stuff was the right one. The journey won't be an easy one, but I am working my damnest to make it best I can so I don't have any more regrets, and also the fastest so we can finally continue with Ep5 too. It might not be in 3 months as I hoped, but I'll do everything I can to do it fast, as I am still relatively free in life.

And of course, patrons can expect in a few weeks the very first sneak peeks preview, altho I posted quite a few behind the scene work in my patreon discord channel already 😁

Thank you for reading, your patience, and I wish you once again a Merry Christmas and an enjoyable week ^^

Love you all, Kat <3