Hey-ho! It's time for another monthly update! 

A lot of the progress made so far is definitely more behind the scenes than anything, plus I've been juggling commission work due to a sudden expense I needed to handle if I wanted to continue art or anything, haha--6 year old tablets, am I right?

Anyway, I started this bit of work by attempting to write the outlines for the next chapters, and I've managed to get two of the three done: The Great Sea and Magic chapters! Fae is still on the table to be completed, but I had to take a quick pause in all that so I could organize my thoughts and put some resources out for my dev team.

First, I made some general species information pages for my characters designers, so they could more easily make designs within certain species parameters.

Here you can see Volvendi and Lapaquin sheets, though I've also done a Mimibo one, and others are slated to be done eventually.

The second resource is mainly for my writers and worldbuilders, so they can have knowledge of everything I have in mind for characters and the general story. I kind of suffer from "I Got It All In My Head" disease, which makes it difficult to sort through things and relay information to people, so actually putting it down where they can access it will definitely help.

Some of it is smaller things like the views mortals had of gods before Blacktooth's creation, while the largest of the bunch is a Characterization Bible--It will contain aaaallll the little tidbits about every major character, detail their personalities and goals, and basically serves as a detailed dissection of who they are, really, so that my writing team can better understand them and perhaps help suggest details in the story!

The process itself for writing the outlines has been a bit jittery, admittedly! It's with the outlines I put the most basic of ideas I have out on paper, and see how well things flow together. I then have my writing team look over it for feedback, refine it based on that, and then move on to actually writing out the script.

However, as we are diving more into the actual meat of the story with these chapters, I might take a pause between the outlining and actual writing to flesh out the routes in their entirety. While the next update will be just the first chapters of each route, I need to figure out how to work their pacing evenly and then decide how long each chapter will be. Will each route have a only a handful of chapters, thus making them proportionally meaty? Or will chapters be broken up into smaller pieces, adding to how many there are? I'm unsure, but as I like to work with a lot of stuff at once, I'm leaning towards the former.

And as I'm considering these options, I'm getting ideas for how to better use what Ren'Py is capable of, and how it would mesh better with the story. So far, my primary ideas are:

• Point and click segments with image mapping
  • While I will admit this story is a story first and a game second, the visual novel medium is ultimately he best format I think I could portray it in, so I do want to have enough interactivity to justify that some more. As such, I'd like to give players the option to poke around the world a bit more, and maybe even progress story beats or do little puzzles with it!
• Limited number of interactions you can have in a single scene, making you have to pick your choices carefully
  • Ideally, this would be something I could go back and add to the interview segments, particularly when we get to the implementation of the looping feature, for the purpose of both streamlining and adding to the idea below.
• Relationship meters for various characters, influencing how the story might progress
  • Best case scenario would be there could be a few different variations to a chapter based on who you make 'friends' with, but as the programming team is only two people at the moment, this is shelved at a lower priority for now.
• Lore Encyclopedia
  • This was a suggestion given by a couple of people who played, and it was definitely a thought I had but slotted under 'polish' when making the initial demo. I've gone and found a good plugin to use for this purpose, and ideally I'll set it up so certain things won't be accessible until they become relevant! I'm aware the game throws quite a bit at you, so having a place to keep track of it all would definitely be a benefit.

But yeah, not much aside from that I can actually show you because it's either just a bunch of stuff tabbed for consideration when I get to writing/programming or super duper spoilery, so... ! 

I hope this update will suffice!

As a reminder, the discord server is publicly open now, so you cna hop in whenever and see what's going on there! I post updates (when I have them) there first, so new people are always welcome!!