Update 0.54 - Keisuke (Patreon)

Hello, everyone,

First of all, to address the obvious: I am massively late on my updates. This Keisuke update had me with the worst writer's block I've ever had to deal with it. I kept staring at my screen for hours only to write a couple of lines during what kept feeling like an eternity. At a certain point, after I realized just how late I was, I started working on Jun's and Shoichi's updates on the side, trying to progress them whenever I wasn't making progress on Keisuke's.

As a result, because I tried to do all those things at once, I ended up being really, really late. Stupidly late. Stupendously late. I keep falling into the vicious cycle of thinking that I'll be able to hit a creativity spurt and beat the clock by a few hours, failing to do that, telling myself that I don't have to let people know if I just manage to get it done in a few hours, failing to do that AGAIN, and repeating ad nauseam. At a certain point, I stopped even looking at my e-mail because the anxiety kept me from being productive, and I chose to work in silence to try and finish this as soon as possible. That is ultimately my fault, and there isn't anything I can do about it.

Some things I will say: Jun's update is not far from completion. I think I should be able to get it done in about a week. Shoichi's update should take one week or so after that. It'll be tough, but I'll try to get all three updates out this month.

In other news, I've also been working on restructuring the prologue. I intend to 'cut the fat,' so to speak, removing some scenes or in-game days that I felt didn't add much to the plot while injecting some livelihood into other areas. The tennis scenes will be redone with new assets that are in the works (I've attached a few of them as an example) so that I can make more dynamic scenes that will both better grab players' attention while also making the scenes easier to understand (by allowing sprites to be placed on the screen with their position and posture relative to what they are doing on the scene). Nyaruh has been working on these for a few months now, but progress is slow because there are just far too many of them. It was definitely an ambitious request, and we're slowly chipping away at it still.

On another front, I will be releasing the images I commissioned for Patreon exclusive short stories (NSFW content) of Shoichi and Haruki for free tonight (in a separate post) and then posting their accompanying short stories at a later date. I realized that it just doesn't make sense for me to charge for them, considering just how late I am on my work in general. It's a meager apology, but until I catch up on the delayed updates, it's what I can offer.

With that said, I do believe this Keisuke update is good. Not three months' worth of wait is good, but... well, hopefully, you guys will like it.

Once again, I can only apologize for my failure at meeting you guys' expectations. I don't expect people to forgive this quite so quickly, and I know I'll need to earn everyone's trust back.

One question that I would like for you guys to answer: In the future, if I were to find myself similarly blocked writing an update for a specific character, would you guys like for me to skip that character's update and make an update for someone else? Keisuke usually gives me trouble due to how much stuff he has going on in the background that I need to keep track of, how guarded he is, how much he measures his words and actions at all times. It's a huge balancing act to figure out exactly how he would express himself at a given moment, where he would draw the line, etc., but that doesn't necessarily mean it will always be the case and that he will be the only one giving me trouble.

Well, all that massive wall of text aside, here's the changelog for this update:

• Day 33 added for Keisuke.
• A few new facial expressions were added for Keisuke (minor change)

TL;DR: Keisuke update took too long. I worked on Jun and Shoichi's updates in parallel whenever I couldn't make progress. Those should be posted in the next couple of weeks. NSFW images of Haruki and Shoichi will be published free of charge tonight, with accompanying short stories coming out hopefully soon. I am very sorry for the delay and lack of communication.

Download link (folder containing all versions): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1y_E4e1LYobwR1ofUR-QNnrjNUnDnuOWy?usp=sharing