Hi everyone!! 

As you all may (or may not) know, our second chapter was recently released. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, feel free to take a look here! The reception has been super heartwarming, and I’m really grateful for all the support and interest <3 Things are still a bit rough for me personally - it kinda goes up and down in waves, but seeing people enjoy and look forward to the release has definitely been something that’s helped me feel a bit better with everything going on, so thank you all so much :’)

Before I get into everything, I want to take a brief second to acknowledge what's happening in Ukraine right now. I'm not personally located in the area, but it's devastating to watch unfold, and my thoughts are with everyone affected by it right now. I'm not completely educated on the political nuances of the situation, but it's very scary to see happening, especially given how hard it is to predict where things will go from here. I know I'm just one person and there's very little I can do in the grand scheme of things, but I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge what's happening before talking about the game since it is important to talk about and I don't want to pretend like it's not happening. So I wanted to take a second to give space to that - my heart goes out to everyone who is being affected right now. 

Initially, I had planned to put this off, but it's so hard to tell how things will be unfolding since everything has escalated so quickly, so I thought it best to just put this out here for now since I had said I would give an announcement today. So regarding the game, I wanted to give a bit of an update/ devlog type of thing just to give a bit of information on the next step for Alaris. As you all may know, this recent chapter release was only slightly unfinished in that I wasn’t able to write up the next options for Free Time. Last I told you all, this next portion of Free Time options would be released either as a small update or just with the next big chapter release depending on what development looked like.

After revisiting the script for Alaris and generally planning out development, I’ve made a couple of ~executive~ decisions. Originally, Alaris was mapped out to have four chapters for the full demo. After seeing what I had written up for the general plot and comparing it to how much content has been covered in these first two chapters, the demo will actually be condensed to three chapters! 

I think this will help with flow and help reduce the overall word count for the full demo. While the more content is usually seen as better, with how things have been going with these first two chapters, if I made Alaris the full four chapters, it would be like 80k-90k words, including Free Time, which is kinda... a lot. Borderline too much for a demo/ common route LOL. Obviously I want to give people as much content as I can, and I do think I’ve structured the common route in a way that won’t feel repetitive with multiple playthroughs because of the Free Time and personality system. But even so, that’s a lot for a demo and I don’t want the word count to be overwhelmingly large. 

So with that being said, I’m going to begin work on the third chapter of Alaris aka THE LAST CHAPTER OF THE DEMO! So with the next release, you will get all the content of the full demo without having to wait as long since I’ll be condensing the original chapters 3 and 4! Because of that, I will probably just release everything - from the missing Free Time to the full plot - with the next release. We’ll see, obviously depending on how development goes and what feels most natural. But for now, I think this is what makes the most sense. 

I know it may not seem like a huge update, but it’s a bit exciting and puts a bit of pressure on me since this means the full demo release, which I originally had thought would be months from now, is coming up much sooner than I thought. I mentioned a while back due to personal circumstances, I’ll be taking a brief personal break (just about a week or so) to let myself relax and take care of my mental health. I’ll still be taking this break this upcoming week but might end up working a bit on Alaris depending on where I’m at mentally. I’ve mentioned before Alaris is very much a passion project and something that brings me joy, so I might work on it casually if I want to, but I’ll be taking the pressure off myself to overproduce this upcoming week just for the sake of my mental health. I also want to catch up on some games that have come out recently that I haven’t been able to play. If we were to finesse this as development update, I’m doing ~research~ to help my own game hahah. 

Anyways, that’s all I have for this week’s update. Not much but also kinda a lot? TLDR: Chapter 3 is in development, and it will be the LAST big update for Alaris - signaling the full release of our demo :D I’ve already started writing Chapter 3 actually since after revisiting the overall plot summary I had written up, I got excited about drafting a little something up. Currently have 3,000+ words written formally, but the entire plot has been broken down for the chapter so you can include that as well for what I have “written and developed” for Chapter 3 so far. I do need to take a break desperately though, so I’m going to force myself to stop for a bit just because I don’t want to burn out. Again, if you haven’t played our newest chapter or our game in general yet, feel free to check it out! Until next time <3