Update 7/17/21

Hey, everyone! Posted a Little last time, figured I should post a freebie today and let everyone know what's going on!

Last time I'd posted, I'd just gotten home from the hospital, and the sleepless nights of parenthood have continued to make the days run together. Today was my first day back at work (at home), and if we can fix the baby's sleep schedule I can start to transition back to in-office work. Kids are hard, but enough of that, here's how Aria's going:

Proof-of-concept demo is more or less content complete, it's now a matter of finding quality non-baby time to polish it into something worth playing. I've attached a couple of quick screenshots just to show you where things are. The backgrounds were designed with parallax scrolling in mind, but implementing all of the layers by hand has taken longer than expected. For the moment, they may be static (as they are in most VNs, including Forks).

Aria is a more open-ended VN than Forks, and includes a map of Sonda Nyl to explore it all. Thanks to the delays, Toro's actually had the time to make old assets more presentable. The first map (with labels) was actually the one we thought we'd use for the demo, but currently he's working on a near-final version (second map). There will be more landmarks added later, but it's already an enormous improvement!

I want to once again thank everyone for their patience as we put this first demo together. It won't initially be as content rich as Forks so there's no worry about burnout, right now it's all about squeezing in writing time while the baby's asleep (he is as I type this as 3am, ha!) 

Writing, planning, and assets are more or less ready, and I'd like to hope that my next project update will include a demo for everyone to try. We'll see when I see you all then!

Get some good rest, everyone! I didn't truly grasp how much I'd miss it until ~90 minutes a night started becoming the norm >_>.