Hello everyone, happy March!

Karamu Trilogy

February was definitely my Kanau development month! Most of the month was devoted to working on the art assets and setting up the voice acting. I started the casting call in early February and finished it in mid-February. I also received all of the voice files and cleaned and adjusted them/requested retakes. I'll be making casting announcements soon; I'm very excited to be working with so many talented individuals! 

I also started and finished all of the art for Kanau. In total, it's 7 backgrounds, 9 CGs, and 21 mini CGs! (Gosh even I'm impressed by how much art I managed to do for this...originally it was just going to be 2 backgrounds and one sprite...)

I also wrote around 6000 words for Hanasu, the Karamu sequel!  

The Deepwater Witch

I finished a few of the remaining CGs for The Deepwater Witch, but there are a couple left to go that I want to take my time with. Since March will be devoted to MINDMINDMIND (and coding the Kanau release), I decided to push back the full TDW release to April. 

MINDMINDMIND (Nano 2024)

I finalized the designs for Geist and Kalei, and I also finished finalizing the outline. In addition, I decided to start the casting call for this one a little early; I do want to release the voiced version for Nano if possible, and I want to give the VAs as much time as possible to record. As a result, I am DEAD SET on finishing the script within the first ten days of March...fingers crossed! 

Other game build related stuff!

I got some reports in January that there were issues with TDW's MacOS build, which is probably because of my engine change (from Unity to Godot). Mac's security systems are notoriously difficult to work with, which is probably what is causing the problems. I decided to bite the bullet and buy an Apple Developer License so I could sign and notarize my Mac builds, but after struggling for around 2 weeks, I concluded: with my current game framework, it is impossible to sign and notarize for Mac. If I want to fix it, then I need to either rewrite all of my code in a different language or go back to Unity. 

I did hear that deploying on itch through itch's command line app (butler) and then playing the game through the official itch app can fix some of the issues. I did that for TDW, and hopefully the MacOS game build is working okay now. If you want to play my games on Mac, please download them through the official itch app. That's the best way to make sure that they play without a hitch. Unfortunately, I don't have a good Mac (the only one I own is around 11 years old at this point), and it's difficult for me to do any Mac testing. If you run into problems, please let me know, and I'll try to get them sorted!

As for Android builds, I'm still waiting on an update to the version of Godot that I use, so I don't have a timeline on that. As soon as Android builds are available, I'll work on ports for Kanau and TDW. 

What am I planning for March?

Kanau is slated to release on Friday, March 8th, so between now and then I'll be hard at work coding. I'm also going to be in the weeds scripting for MINDMINDMIND so that I can give a script to the VAs as soon as I cast (I'm aiming for around 2k words a day...hopefully...) After Kanau is released, I'll be finalizing the MINDMINDMIND script, and then the rest of the month will be devoted to putting MINDMINDMIND together. It will be finished by the end of March, by hook or by crook!

Thank you to everyone for reading, and I'll see you next month! 

If you want to hear from me more often, I post most of my major announcements on Tumblr and Twitter. I also post frequently on my Patreon with sketches, writing snippets, sneak peeks, high resolution art, and weekly devlogs.