Hi everyone! 

We are already close to March, which is crazy to me. This year is flying by oml. 

Before we get into things, I wanted to highlight some of the events we've celebrated this month. First, with Etza's birthday:

And then with Valentine's Day:

Our little team continues to work hard to bring Alaris to life, so let's see what we've been up to this month!

Writing

I officially, officially finished Fenir's draft this month---plot, personality options, romance choices, and more. And we are sitting at almost 50k words now, bringing us close to where Kayn's route is at! So, I'll be shifting to developmental editing for Fenir's route now. Kayn's route is also getting the last finishing touches before I hand it off for final editing to our line editor.

I have some exciting news now that Kayn's route is just about wrapped up with developmental changes, which I'll be announcing at the beginning of March on Tumblr, so stay tuned!

Now that Kayn and Fenir's routes are in other people's hands, I'm hoping to start Druk's route this upcoming month! I was initially supposed to work on his route after Kayn, but I was having trouble writing it. Since then, I've gotten a good amount of inspiration, so I'm excited to return to his character <3 

Art

Vui has continued to build out the beautiful world of Alaris. Here, we have the Cafe BG, which we will see in Free Time, and the Library BG! I continue to be blown away by his ability to create such beautiful pieces, and I can't wait to see everything in-game. 

I also recently commissioned a friend for some item art! I initially wasn't going to commission item art for Alaris, but I'm so glad I decided to since the result is infinitely more beautiful than anything I would've come up with <3

The results of this commission are... affection point indicators! For those of you who have played the demo, you may know that there are personality indicators (which I will also probably be updating). I thought it would be nice to also add affection point indicators so it was clear when choices were specifically related to personality or affection points.

Each of the icons contain a flower, which is associated with an LI. I wonder if you all can guess which ones are associated with which LIs, hehe! If you are versed in flower language, you might even get hints into them as characters/their routes uwu

Pictured (from left to right): Primrose, Chinese Milk Vetch, Azalea, Peach Blossom, Petunia, Lily of the Valley

I continue to make progress on the CGs of Alaris. Progress was a bit slow on my end for art this month. I focused more of my time on writing and commissions, to be honest! But as it stands, I have 4/6 of the demo CGs for the individual LIs finished (Etza and Druk await rendering while I wait on the BG). And then 8/9 of Kayn's CGs have been either sketched up, lined/colored, or are completely rendered! 

Additional Notes

In other news, aside from development, I launched my Patreon this month as well (yay!!). There is no pressure at all to support, but doing so will give you more in-depth sneak peeks at development, access to early builds of the game (when available), and help raise funds for different aspects of the game, such as voice acting, art commissions, etc.! Thank you to everyone who has already supported the Patreon :')

I think that's enough from me, so that is all for this month's update! Stay safe, and see you all next month <3