Hi everyone!
It's been a while since my last update here so I wanted to quickly check in just to give a status report. 

In my last update I had just finished Reuben's route draft and it was 111,000 words uncoded.

I revised Reuben's route twice since then. It ended up at about 117,000 words uncoded but...once I coded it, it ended up at just under 110,000 words since the routes always lose a fair amount when I convert them to functional code. This brings the game's total word count to 926,000 words. 😱😱

So after going through several revisions, I ran the chapters through a editing software to catch as many of those smaller typos and grammar issues (and missing commas, etc) as possible. As I said, I scripted the route (meaning I put it in renpy and formatted it to be playable code.)

I have set up preliminary scoring for his route - it still needs to be tested and probably tweaked a little, though. I made the chapter cards with the chapter titles and coded those in. I made a first pass through the route to code in the major BG changes; I will probably be tweaking these as well, but it's useful to have those done up front when I start testing. I also, of course, edited and coded any Reuben-specific BGs that were needed, so those are all in the game now too.

I also made mock-ups of Reuben's flowchart. I noticed that most of Reuben's branching is happening in small variations rather than major branching at the choices (he does also have a few more choices than other routes). But there are just a ton of little variations.

I dreamed about working on Reuben's sprites...but I didn't actually do it. 🤣🤣 So I guess that doesn't count... 😩

So with the writing done, I would say about half the work on Reuben's route is complete. There's still a lot to do. I have to:

• code the Music and SFX
• create a few BG animations. 
• create 4 unique sprites + 1 "Bob" (IE an 'extra')
• create several new outfits for Morgan and Reuben
• code in all the sprite expressions (there are about 6000 - 6500 expression changes per route. So...that's fun.)
• create the actual flowcharts with the proper images
• code those in
• draw the CGs and code those in
• Then test everything

So there's still a fair amount of work to be done in this route. Although I personally consider the writing to be the biggest hurdle, obviously there's a lot of work in every single route and it'll be a while yet before Reuben is ready for players. But I am making progress.

I will probably be back in a month or so to check back in.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and I really hope this new year is off to a lovely start. Thank you all for your support! I appreciate you!

~Esh