Starting from August, I've been undertaking a comprehensive review and rewrite of the entire project, which has evolved far beyond its original scope. The more I delved into the third story arc, the more I realized how this project had taken an unexpected direction. I had personal goals in mind when I started working on this visual novel - and when I say "personal" I *really* mean it. These goal were achieved, at the same time however I found myself craving for something else - something which is still deeply personal and yet at the same time feelsso much more ambitious.

My last updates were riddled with attempts at crafting a narrative bridge to close the gap between my past goals and the new ones I've been (more or less consciously) setting for myself. The more I read them, the more they felt like temporary band-aids that couldn't truly live up to their scope.

So here's the thing:

• The script is currently undergoing a massive overhaul. The initial goal of the game - keeping the readers guessing whether what they are reading is real, or a dream, or a delusion - is still there. I'm not throwing what I already wrote out of the window (well, mostly) however I am relocating stuff so that the result feels more organic and meaningful. At the same time I am adding things and expanding over the existing content so that everything (hopefully) will work better - I'd love to say *a lot* better but I'm not that ambitious. Just "better" will do, yeah. Think of it as furnishing a house: as of now I've been bringing a lot of furniture but I've been leaving it in the hall. Now I aim at having the bed in the bedroom, the sofa in the living room... and so on. The result of these (nearly) 3 months' work (covering a large part of the introductory arc and a good 75% of the first story arc) looks a bit like this (yeah I'm using Miro to keep track of my work):

• At the same time I am working on refining the artwork... no, I don't plan to hire actual artists for sprites and scenes - I do not have the coin for that and I honestly not the kind of person who can succesfully run a funding campaign or make a patreon page feel even *vaguely* interesting. So I'll keep working with Koikatsu, however these months taught me how to use shaders to isolate the many parts of a character - facial features, hair, clothing, etc. Long story short,  layered images is the way I'm picking - again with a twist, as each character will have a number of poses, and perhaps the same "emotion" will be available in different poses (after all it's not like we take a specific pose to "smile" or "laugh" or whatever!). The added content is going to require additional scenes, and the existing ones will be rethought with the goal of making them blend with the look I'm currently developing. Again it's not going to look like something hand-drawn, still I hope I'll be move beyond your typical Koikatsu look.
• Oh, and of course I'm going to make the UI look a bit better. Will come *really* easy considering the way it looks now, uh...

Now for the much dreaded question: when?

There currently are NO deadlines. If you really want figures, then consider that the above flowchart represent some 15-20k lines of a script which is going to get 3 to 4 times bigger. Three months to cover roughtly one fourth to one third of the whole game. Makes 9 to 12 months' work - and we're still talking about a *part* of the complete game!

Same logic applies to the sprites: creating the arts for Mika is taking some 4-5 weeks' work. Multiply that for the number of characters I've got to deal with and you get - say, 40 to 50 weeks? That still sounds like "a year or so" to me.

Last but not the least, in-game art. I beg you, do *not* ask me about the in-game atr.

I know it sounds very lame. I ask you to be patient as this is my very first attempt at writing a visual novel - I *know* I should have started nice and easy which a small project and - whatever, Spartans do not ask how many the enemies are but where they are. That's how this project is meant to be - reckless, foolish and absurdly optimistic. Accept my apologies, it's my first time and I've got a lot to learn - actually I'm learning a lot.

And after all it's not like I'm slacking: as  a Milanese saying goes, "doing and undoing both count as working" (fà e desfà l'è tut un laurà).