Aoi's Route... with Some Struggles

Hello! I've been working on Aoi's route since mid June. Originally, I expected to release this update by July 16th (GMT +8), but I've run into a few problems.

If you played Arthur's route when it's first released on May 31st, you might notice an "Ending CG" of some sort popping out when you go through all 3 dialogues. At first, I thought it'll be a nice way to wrap up the story, as well as a reward for the player who finished the game. However, as I planned for updates, I noticed these CGs take a lot of time to make.

To put it more precisely, CGs that are supposed to be additional awards after beating the game, ends up dragging the whole update down.

Why is this happening?

I can only work on this game in my free time. And by free time it means 11pm to 2~3am, 3 to 4 hours every day. Sometimes I get too exhausted from work, and nothing gets done on that day.

If I work for 3 hours every day to produce said CG, it'll take me around a week to finish 1 CG art. And, just as mentioned above, during a month there will be some days I can't work on this project. What's worse, I am well aware that if I push too hard I might end up burning myself out. 

Along with this post are a completed character sprite of Aoi and her CG wip. I'm not the proudest at my pixel art, I'm just doing my best. But even delivering a mid piece like this is a huge challenge for me. And to think this project still has no audio; I did spend some time experiencing in LMMS with Freeboy VST but the results probably won't make it into this update.

As there are still some loose threads that need to be tied together, I will try my best to stick to the estimated release date. Fingers crossed.

Conslusion

I'm contemplating if having ending CGs is a good idea as it's quite time-comsuming. Experimenting with audios but it's not coming with this update. There are still some work need to be done, I'm trying my best but there's a chance for this update to be delayed, for a week at max.

Despite all the struggles behind the scenes, I hope you'll enjoy this update nonetheless.