Can you believe it's Friday again??

Thanks for everyone's words of encouragement over the past week! Mom was released from the hospital earlier this week and is back to enjoying her first full calendar year of retirement at home, and I felt my first little baby kick last night. All-in-all, a perfect week!

I'm still working around the power cuts, and it's becoming a part of life. All sources (government and private sector) agree that it's going to continue like this for the foreseeable future. Better get used to it.

I've added two contract team members on the art side since November. We briefly hit the $1K per month Patreon support in November/December, achieving the goal of getting some additional help involved. Right now, it's cutting into my savings while we're below the $1K mark, but there is no reason for concern yet. Once you see what we've been up to, you'll agree it was worth the investment.

But, on to the main reason you're here! Infinite Stars.

Writing and polishing have been going well. It has put me in an awkward position, though. I'm eager to get the next public release out that includes the new portraits, story and some major bug fixes, but the current content batch needs to be completed first to prevent running into a gameplay wall. I'm working as fast as I can, juggling all my other responsibilities (mostly my day job).

I did, however, manage to upgrade from Ren'Py 7.x to Ren'Py 8.x, futureproofing the project for the foreseeable future. This also gives us access to newer Python functionality that we might or might not take advantage of. It took some effort to update the code. The last time I tried it, the game would not launch, but that's been fixed now!

Atom, the program I've been using to code the script, has been sunset. I bit the bullet and switched over to Visual Studio before we run into any issues down the line.

Stoffies has been working on the next background that we teased in this design insight post, and Tae has been working nonstop on the character updates. (I'd like to clarify that Tae and Stoffies will continue working on Infinite Stars, but they aren't the two new members I mentioned earlier. They will be announced in due course!)

Seriously, Tae has been working nonstop, and she managed to finish the whole crew earlier this week. There are still a few minor changes that we'll be making, mostly expression-wise, before she tackles the Cephilusk crew. In the meantime, I'll share this picture of our favourite brother and sister!

Thanks for reading! I appreciate each and every one of you! You're all amazing people, and I couldn't have asked for a better community!