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Hello, hello~! Happy June! I have a lot to report for this devlog actually… A lot of insanity behind the scenes, but some good progress! I’m really happy, especially because it’s the one-year anniversary of announcing this project!

Done…:

• Re-did Rie’s Route
• Designed non-romanceable characters [For KKPP-DE]
• Working on Yuna’s Route
• Working on routes for non-romanceable characters
• Lots of organizing of ideas

To do…:

• Keep working on Yuna’s Route
• Keep working on planning routes for non-romanceable characters

I said, I re-did Rie’s route… And I did…! But as my girlfriend often remarks, I am Sisyphus and making things more convoluted is the boulder I continually push up. However, this is not to say all the progress up till this point is for nothing– in fact, a lot of good work was done! 

However, a lot of this is also affected by me extending the length of the game… (Good thing KKPPDE is now the ‘main’ part huh-). More or less, I’ve been playing a lot of Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side 1 and it’s influenced me a lot (even more than the original in some ways– both with gameplay elements I really like and gameplay elements that really annoy me; That’s a whole other discussion though). 

I decided the initial 4-month span the game takes place over is… Painfully short, especially for romance. It made the pacing really awkward and I don’t really like it. So, instead, I decided to extend it to around 11 months. This makes it not feel as weird pacing wise… But it also requires more writing. So, while now I’m putting Rie and Chihiro’s route on the backburner, I will circle back to them at some point before doing a full over edit (I’ll probably finish Yuna, Nana, Yui’s and the non-romanceable character’s routes first)

Working on Yuna’s route is a whole thing of itself… I’m actually kind of working on it backwards– Writing the more ‘meatier’ part of the story first to figure out what I need to properly set up these later scenes. That’s actually been pretty helpful in this! I still have some bullet points to hit, but I’m also just seeing how many scenes I can make while making this natural as well.

Another big thing is adding in some non-romanceable characters. My girlfriend really helped ground me and realize what I needed to round out this world and she made a good point: the world felt kind of empty with the only characters you encounter being romanceable characters. So, to help make it feel fuller, I added 4 mini-routes! The classmate [Yoshi], the salary man [Jin], the kid [Emi], the older lady [Yuuma]. [Names/Designs tentative] I don't plan on them being as in depth as the romanceable options, but I still want them to have a decent enough route each.

Also, I organized my thoughts really well in yet another new doc for myself..! However, it was mainly a doc about things such as ideas, things between the two parts of the game [Deluxe and Chihiro’s story], and small gameplay mechanic notes for DX. 

To sum up this month, I did around 40 pages in the last 2 weeks… Which amounts to 17 different events (~2.3 pages per event). 

Lots to still do this month, but June is also Artfight prep month for me… So, busy, busy!

Thank you for reading~! Have a lovely month!