A mostly technical devlog describing upcoming new content and extra technical stuff.

The freeroam and jumping between events sometimes leave things lacking. Small conversations that comment on stuff that happened are nice but require a lot of work due to the game being a VN. For example, the conversation with Asara about Erika, after talking to Willow.

When asking Willow how to remove the curse, the player can mention it to Asara. It's a little, short conversation with 3 scenes, but because Asara shows up in different places throughout the day, this requires accounting for every single location. Thus we end up with 9 scenes. This makes short conversations and small talk a chore to make, doubling or tripling the work.

This is something I wanted for a long time. but couldn't quite get it right. Until now. The main ideas were it had to be:

• lightweight (don't want it lagging like the laptop)
• allowing for rollback
• fit for the main purpose, texting

The phone's purpose is to give extra content and comments on stuff that's going on and more interactions with the girls for far less work. I always felt it lacking when a major thing happens but I can't give some of the characters' views or input due to pacing issues.

Texting can be automatic on a timer or click to proceed like regular dialogue.

You can no longer open a few screens (for example inventory and world map) at the same time, but I don't think this is something most people did anyway. On the other hand, clicking outside the screen will now close it, so it's easier to reopen stuff. You can also select which icons to show in free roam mode, so you can remove that inventory if you're not using it anyway.

Another good change is that inventory now supports rollback.

And some more previews:

Moving on from the phone to events & hints.

The world map hints have been redone and completely integrated with the event triggers. This is something I've been doing by hand up until now (it worked well with the few events at start) but finally got fed up with. What this means for you is better hints that also show events on delay.

Completing that one Asara event with the old system would empty the window, making the player think there's no more available events.

Further changes include:

• Switching off inactive hints will now also display how many events are hidden
• Ability to hide only delayed events (the ones saying wait 1-2 days) - work pending on this one
• Right clicking the character icon will display extra options.
• Location events display which character owns the event.

This brings me on to glossary hints which, after much consideration, have been removed entirely. They were used to display both available and unavailable events, but required far too much manual input with late-game branching and were generally pointless as some characters have no events until very late game. After some playtesting with the new map hints, they were made redundant.

Lastly, unrelated to the above, there have been some improvements in free roam scripts, making the whole thing run smoother. Mostly old spaghetti code removal.

Thank you for reading this devlog and playing the game. Hope you're looking forward to update 0.40.