four?? years??

Four is, famously, a number I'm quite fond of.

Unlike previous years, I'm going into this annual progress update with absolutely no preconceived notions about how much work I've been doing since last time.  I've had a pretty weird year!  My mental health's been all over the place!  I started quite a few more side projects!  I've been writing poetry and other stand-alone short things!  I developed some really strong opinions about The King In Yellow for some reason?  (Keep an ear out elsewhere about that one.  Maybe.)

The point is, I don't have a whole lot I'll be able to say about it until I tabulate the raw numbers.  (Besides the fact that I started trying to sort my folder better and then quickly gave up, which I forgot about until just now lol.)  So, let's go ahead and do that!

"Chapter One" remains unchanged from last year, keeping that segment at a word count of 8,447.
The segments past that, once more divided by route & in-between-with-just-you:

• Cherry: 4,742 (last year: 1,288)
• Elby: 4,773 (last year: 3,089)
• Bevelyne: 4,255 (last year: 4,250)
• You: 2,609 (last year: 1,698)
• Secret: 217 (last year: 213)

... Wow!  I certainly readjusted my priorities a bit this year!  This takes us to 16,596 for everything beyond Chapter One, and a total word count of 25,043, which is 5,486 more than last year.  I definitely did much more... unrelated writing than over the course of the previous update's year, but I still managed to more than double the progress I made on Snippy!  I'm basically the best guy ever invented.

Not much exciting behind-the-scenes stuff to tell you, except... the endings for both Elby and Bevelyne's routes are all done!  (I can't remember when exactly I finished writing Bevelyne's endings, actually, but... whatever!)  Still kinda busy ironing out the kinks with Cherry's route, but I've got some pretty solid ideas for at least one of her endings.  That's the problem with basing her route around an aspect of my life that I'm still making new discoveries about, huh?
That obviously doesn't mean those routes are done, because even if I weren't a sicko who writes long-form narratives completely out of order based on whims alone, that would leave editing.  And my editing process, vitally, requires me to spend a very very long time not looking at whatever it is at all.  But it's a pretty nice milestone regardless!

Last time around, I said I was hoping to have a rough guesstimate of how much longer it'd take me to finish this by now.  Well, I don't.  But that's not a bad thing!  I've been spending a lot of time reconsidering how I actually want this to be structured.  Which, ideally, should lessen how much work I need to do in the long run while also improving the final product at the same time.  I've also been mulling over some parts of the narrative again- stumbling into a lot of unrelated discussions about what makes good psychological horror, or what makes a longer visual novel not so much of a slog to the more casual enjoyers, and I even attended a talk on the science behind fear in-person earlier this month!  (Touching grass is important when working on a story about people who are always really busy touching grass.  Even if those fictitious people are, vitally, still really bad at socializing.)

I'm not gonna make any promises this time.  Like I said, I'm a bit too focused on ~game design~ and whatnot at the moment to know the framework well enough to promise much on the writing front!  I've already identified at least one section that I'm gonna have to explode with a laser and start completely over if I want this to be A Story That I'm Happy With!  Also, I have a couple things that still need accessibility updates from last year's surprise short-game-spree.  Whoops.
But it is going to be 5 whole years next year, so there'll probably be something big then.  Like, I whipped up a short script for a new voice-acted thing the other day that I didn't have time to record, so probably at least that.  Is that a promise?  Fuck

... Oh, yeah, I'm also working on opening a new merch store since the last one exploded.  Keep an ear out if stickers of the main quartet and whatever gayass nonsense I've been into interests you.  Also, somewhat lower priority, but I'm probably gonna restructure the rewards on my ko-fi after I'm done with that (and the old behind-the-scenes posts I've made about this and other projects remain if those interest you).  And I'm on bluesky now, pretty sure that's new to This Year?

Happy Whatever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!