Soooo that just happened. *cue laugh track while I wink at the camera for 15 minutes straight*

And by "that" I mean the moderately sized update for my stupid shitty magnum opus of a furry trash visual novel! *winks at the camera again for another 10 minutes while uproarious_laughter.ogg plays*

But enough self deprecating! Now where was I? *checks notes*

Blog post to do list

    make self deprecating jokes

    stop roleplaying, it's not funny

    write to do list (I/you am/are here)

    insult fans

    blame depression for everything

    underline "everything"

    talk about bugs+features

    talk about uhhhh

    figure out the rest as you go

First of all, I'd like to give a huge thank you to all my fans who have such poor taste they actually played this dumpster fire! Lololo I'm just kidding. But seriously though, perhaps the real dumpster fires were inside us all along. This is the part where I, as an indie game developer, endlessly rant about my very personal depression that none of you should care about. The past year was probably the worst and best I've had yet. Was homeless for most of that time, which was both exciting and miserable. A cloud of delusion and angst hovered around me that I couldn't do anything about until one day it just kinda vanished. Moving to a new job probably had something to do with that. Speaking of which, I'm leaving my job in a few months to go back to being a hobo, but a mentally stable one this time. I'm gonna be travelling a lot but other than survival, working on Coda will become my primary job until I go back to college.

But enough about me, you're here for the cute critter .png and .txt files. I'll be making an art book (digital and physical versions) with all the art from the game. So that'll be cool. That brings me to the background art question: what the hell am I gonna do about those? I still don't know. AI generated backgrounds look like they might be a viable option. Imo that would be preferable to edited photo backgrounds, especially since I won't be able to take photos of all the types of backgrounds I need. The alternative is paying someone to draw completed backgrounds, which doesn't fit into the current budget of $0.00. Being a bum gets expensive, so I won't be able to fund it myself anymore. The game will be free when it's fully released but I may ask for donations at some point because I'd like to double the amount of art that's currently in the game and waifus don't come cheap! Whatever happens, I'll finish the writing and programming with whatever I've got and just reuse art as needed.

In the coming months, I'll release a minor update that addresses some of the feedback I've received. Overall the game needs to be more reactive to the player's choices. One example of a change I'll make is if you sit with Claire during the movie night, she'll be less intimidating during the camping scene. I'd like to do stuff like that all throughout the game. I also feel like the characters still need a bit more to them to make them feel more real and interesting. I have some ideas on how to do that. I'll tweak some existing scenes but there are a few planned scenes missing from this update that will help with that. The biggest issue with the writing at the moment are the dating scenes, which are very rushed. I'll make another revision of those. Finally, I'll reduce the file size. A third of the file size is redundant audio still lingering after I redid all the music, but I kept in the files because I haven't caught all the places in the code that still call those old files. Currently there is a "bug" (actually just me being illiterate) that causes some choices to have unintended effects that determine who you date. Oops. I'll fix that lol. And I forgot to swap out Volginova's sprite with the colored version.

That's all I have for now. Thanks everyone for playing! This project has really become larger than I ever anticipated and it's been a lot of fun working on it. I want to keep making it better for everyone to enjoy and eventually have a final thing I can say I'm happy with.