State of the Metacosm 1/26: Where Did January Go

Hello to my bros, hoes, and those.

So. That first month, huh? Wild.

I know I said I wouldn’t do SotM every month and I don’t plan to hold myself to that as a Stressor, but we did have a lot happen in January (or, well, the first half of it) and I’m just getting this out late because the second half/into now early Feb has been. Uh. Yeah.

Let’s get the most important news out of the way: we finished the alpha for our first visual novel!!! At 2.1k words it took me about six months, but that was me whole-assing it, learning, and taking breaks all at the same time.

I sent it out to some trusted people for testing and based on the feedback, we decided to expand it!

The new script was finalized at just over 4k. It’s already been mostly coded into place. I have some new sprites and art to do, which hopefully won’t take another six months, but there’s a character design that is kind of stymieing me, so, we’ll see 😬

Sneak peek of the new placeholder art with completely revamped UI from the last version:

(We’re expanding on Arthur’s part in the novel so for those of you who saw our blonde paladin girl and were interested in her, good news!)

The second half of Jan was kind of a wash because my symptoms (for those who don’t recall, I’m chronically ill) hit me hard for some reason, and I’m still trying to crawl out of the hole they put me in. I did manage to do a shocking amount of art recently, so maybe soon I’ll do an art dump!

All of our writing projects are pretty stalled, unfortunately, though I have been pecking away at them when I can.

New Everdark is I think around 7k, and the prequel novella is at around 3.5k. Small numbers but slowly rising. Admittedly I wanted to get this visual novel out before I threw myself back into writing wholeheartedly, so this is a bit of a setback to the timeline, but I really really love the changes we made, so I don’t regret it.

Hopefully by the next SotM I’ll have a link for you guys to download the finished VN (it’ll be free!), but maybe that’s jinxing myself.

We finish out with Art from the Metacosm, and Jan’s is one of the best pieces I’ve done to date I think, of the main character from Project:Freqs, Yuri: