These months really fly by, don’t they? Sometimes it can be hard to sit down and try to write one of these devlogs, but when I look back on it I actually accomplished more than I thought. We’re all prone to narrowing in on stuff rather than looking at the whole picture- that is, it’s easy to forget every step we had to take to get to where we are.

So today I’ve got more to share than just writing!

To start off, Valentines was earlier this month! I drew couples chibis of Niko & Ren and Hazel & Aster (from Asphodelium) to celebrate.

Maybe they’ll be stickers up in the store soon? Who knows~

Now onto writing! I ended up writing about 8k for Canvas Menagerie in February, with me taking a break from writing it the last week of February. That brings the current wordcount for Canvas Menagerie to 120,606 words! I’m estimating it to be around 150k when it’s fully finished.

I was also able to hammer out a scene by scene outline for the rest of the script. I had a vague idea of where I wanted to go with it and knew some scenes I wanted to hit, but nothing set (mostly) in stone until now. The last part of the game shows Niko & Ren’s growing relationship and wrapping up some of the loose ends from prior parts, namely about Ren’s relationship with his family.

Last but not least in February I started working towards getting the first 1/3rd of the game ready for playtesting. For the most part this means editing the script and putting it all in Ren’Py (a process that can take a day for just a scene or two), but it also means drawing additional outfits for the cast!

Almost all of the CGs are already done for the first section of the game (a lot of them are viewable in the demo), so a majority of the art left to do for it are these outfits for special occasions. For the outfits above, the cast is at a studio party.

— Arimia