Hey everyone! Hope you all are doing swell today?

It's my birthday today, so it's officially the birthday update! We got a little birthday treat at the end. A bit of a special offer if you want to support the game.

First off, a lot has been done behind the scenes. As you may have noticed, the game is actually substantially smaller than version 4, which is down to me just making more efficient use of some of the tools that RenPy has to offer now that I'm a little more comfortable with the coding part of the whole ordeal.

This in turn will open up even more options when it comes to character details on the main screen.
A first taste of it is that Arthur's character portrait actually has two different lighting setups, one for direct sunlight and one for indirect light, to simply have him feel more fitting in whatever scene he currently is. It could even open up the path to small animations, like moving tails for example. BUT I am no animator, that'll be something to look into in the future and maybe an area to hire someone for it if the funding allows.

Next up: UI v2

Update 3 already had a little bit of an overhaul in some areas, but this update includes a complete rework of all areas of the UI, with the aim to finally unify the feel of the game more thoroughly that way.
This part I am really quite proud of! (partly because of just how much bloody work it was, trying out this, getting frustrated by that not working, and everything. Again, I'm not a coder, so making a working gallery, where the correct things are shown, the buttons do the right things, and nothing breaks is one hell of a victory!) I think it looks really nifty and while UI is rarely ever the show-stealer, I hope you'll enjoy this look!

Also new to that are options to turn on/off both NSFW imagery and descriptions/imagery of blood

Now this is not planned to be some kind of slasher horror game or anything like this. But things like injuries happen, it's just part of the setting and exactly BECAUSE it's not meant to be a very gory game I wanted to put the option in, so that people can just turn it off if they don't vibe with it.
It doesn't take these scenes out entirely, but will just give an alternative version of it, where for example the blood might not be mentioned, or the character looks away or whatever may fit best in a certain scene.

Similarly with NSFW, just want to provide the option for it if you plan to play on the bus, or with family around. This one WILL NOT change what is happening in the scene though. So you will still get to read how a character is getting a hot dicking, however, there simply won't be any 18+ pictures accompanying it and the character sprite will stay clothed.
This one can cause some weirdness if you switch the setting while in an adult scene, simply because I call for your NSFW preferences when some lewd graphic is loaded. So if that graphic is already present, and you change it to "NSFW Off" then I don't really have an easy way to change it on the fly (and vice versa as well)... So it's not perfect, but I think for an adult-focused visual novel, urgently needing to change the NSFW setting on the fly is probably a pretty niche scenario let's be honest.

Sound!

We had the ambiance in the last version already and this time around the sound effects are added throughout the game as well, to perhaps add a little more flair to it for those of you that enjoy it.

Art!

Of course we've got some new art in this bad-boy too. Namely the proper images for the scene in Nomax's cabin on day 2, and Arthur getting his proper character sprite. You may have to play the scene again to get the proper Nomax pictures in the gallery. I didn't plan to have 4 versions of it, so I didn't implement unlocks for all of them and you may only have 2/4 unlocked.

And Writing

Writing is the odd one out. See, I should be content with it, It's about 8k of new story, and implementing all the choices one can have at the decision point where you only could go to Nomax before.

However, given how stoked I was about some of the developments earlier in the month it does feel like a bit of an underwhelming outcome.
See, I made the decision to look for some help with the writing. Honestly, I don't think my writing it too bad, but I'll always have the trouble of not being a native english speaker. So there is just a degree of difficulty that I have to deal with that holds parts of my writing back.

So I reached out at the beginning of the month to see if getting some help might be possible. And somehow I ended up with not just one, but two people. A good friend of mine, Jäger, who I consider to be wonderful fit for the story and a wonderful writer as well, having worked in areas such as copywriting before.

And Rob ( https://robert-baird.sofurry.com/ ) who I SOMEHOW got to agree to help out with a stupid cold-open fanboy note.

You can't believe just how stoked I was! Rob is easily one of the best writers this fandom has to offer, and Jäger is someone who I know will provide exactly the synergy that is needed for the story to really eek out what I want from it, and to have someone to figure it out with together.

Aaaaaaaand then of course both ran into trouble this month. Pfffff!
Just my luck! I thought I was safe! Two of them, even if something doesn't work out with one, then we still got the other one. Can't go tits up!

None of it is anyone's fault of course, just one of those situations where the world threw a few hurdles in the way, and I myself also just had to figure out how to on-board people on a project that's been going on for roughly half a year by now, that has had nobody but me work on it.

So that's why we "only" ended up with 8k words in new story added this month. This is by no means a bad amount in the end, just the difference between what I had hoped for and what it turned out to be of course are a tad different.

But I mean look at these patch notes, it's still probably the biggest update of the bunch with so much stuff i'm really really happy with and that'll help this game going forward as well! I think we did pretty well!

I hope you're enjoying what's there and thank you all so much for giving this game a shot!

Then lastly, the birthday offer!

Do you like the game? Do you want to support the development of it?  The last two months have been really quite good when it comes to new patrons, but naturally everything added to it will increase the options of what we can do with the game.
So from right now until the 7th of August the yearly patreon subs will come with a 16% discount/2 free months!
Win-Win, you get to help with the game and get some extra stuff on top.

You can have a look over here and thank you very much if you do end up joining! : https://www.patreon.com/Nomax