Hey everyone!
Hope you are all doing alright?

First of the month and like clockwork we've got update 8 ready and waiting for you all, and it's a biggy! As I've mentioned in a few places already it is our biggest update yet by quite a margin, in large thanks to Rubric, who did a brief scene in the last update and took over writing almost the entirety of the dice scene this time around. But let's go through things one after another.

Art:
We have of course two new character sprites, in Perce Blackborow, who now actually is more than just a ghost in the room when you pick Arthur's route during dinner on day 1, and now just that but he will actually be shirtless too, compared to the publicly released image of him. So that never hurts right? Not exactly going to wear your full getup when you're sick in bed after all.
Alongside Perce we do have the next Patron character for the Maritime Menagerie and above tier. So the sailor who calls over Samuel during the morning shift now will be Schwartz, a friendly Otter who belongs to t987-a5256-b85-zrr. So a massive thank you to them for their support!
Character 2.5 is the second version of Wolf, who gets his updated look in this update, so now he can be quiet in a corner while looking even better than before!
Then last but not least we do have potentially two art scenes? Was the dice artwork in the last version already? Can't quite remember. Anyway, there's that one and another one in the Dice scene with a couple of variants. :) A pretty fun one for a short little scene.

Story: And then the big one for this one, the written part. This update is almost scratching the 26k word mark, with two new scenes. The dice one, obviously, and an optional one if you ended up visiting Nomax earlier. Funnily enough, they're not even necessarily crazy long, but both scenes just have plenty of options and potential outcomes. One thing that is a bit of a bummer is that the randomly generated dice roll is a smaller part of this than initially anticipated. However, that is down to me messing up the rules of Hazard, and then having to find a workaround because the actual rules of the game wouldn't really work smoothly for it. So it's less interesting, but some randomness is still fun and a good learning experience for me to just add a little bit of extra knowledge for the coding language.

Funnily enough, this update might actually be really rather short depending on past choices. Which of course is bound to happen. But yeah, if you didn't go to Nomax then of course his whole scene won't be there, and if you didn't go for the dice game then all you end up getting is  a little bit of a continuation of that scene, and that's it. But that just is the nature of the beast I suppose. We do want to make it as interactive and different of an experience for everyone, so it's just bound to happen that not everyone's route is making progress. Especially now that we are starting to get out of the introductory period and we have enough past choices to spread our wings a little more.

But yes, I think that is it. Not too much changed in the periphery of it, simply because at this point we have things like the UI, sounds and all that pretty much nailed down, which is good. That means these update writeups will probably become a bit stale since it'll often just be "More art and writing!" But of course, those areas are the ones you all care the most about and where, at this point, we can pretty much pour all our efforts.

In any case though, I hope you'll enjoy this update and may the dice roll in your favour!

And hey, of course as always, if you want to go the extra step and support the making of this game then you can do over on Patreon. It'd be greatly appreciated and you can get some neat stuff in return, like of course early access to updates, the ability to steer development a little bit, or even to get your character into the game! Just hit the banner below and it'll take you there. Would love to see you join the community of other lovely folks who help make this game possible!