Update Progress, FAQ, Fat Girls

An Update is in the Works. Here's a post about that.

(The above gif is a shot of the new indoor hotel area you can visit in between days. The character spritework is by Squid.)

Firstly, let's get some Frequently Asked Questions out of the way.

"Is the game still in development?" - Yes, of course.
"When will the update be out?" - Once it's got enough content that I'm satisfied with it mostly. There's lots planned and a fair chunk in progress.
"Did you know about the bug where Ellies body disappears?" - Yeah! It's fixed in the upcoming update. A lot of things are.
"Will the game remain free?" - For the foreseeable future. Definitely the next update will be free. But we've talked a bit about doing a paid 1.0 build and trying to get it on steam or something. Uncertain if this'll actually come to pass, but it's an idea.
"Why is Spamt-" Alright let's get to the rest of the devlog!
____________________________________________________________________________

I do want to give a little explanation as to why the update has taken as long as it has. On the whole, everyone's been incredibly kind regarding the game, and while people are curious for updates, I don't think anyone's been unreasonable about it at all honestly.
The simple truth is that myself and Dip, the primary developers here, are both pretty busy at the moment. I'm working through the holiday season of course, and Dip's had a lot going on in his personal life. It's just been a lot going on really. Keeping up the pace of the gamejam simply hasn't been in the cards for us. Plus, admittedly, I've wanted to step back a little and try to make sure future content is a bit more bulletproof, and improve the old stuff.

Speaking of the old stuff.

I've been trying to make the previous content in the game a bit more fun based on prior feedback. The car dodging minigame is a little shorter, it has a new feature where you can charge into obstacles with temporary invincibility, and I've updated it a bit for visual clarity. Hopefully this makes it more engaging! Also, there's a tutorial now just in case. Currently this will only play once but I'd like to give the option to view it elsewhere later

The Shmup of course will be getting some love too. It'll have an ending, powerups, some new graphics. Hopefully this can help out with some of the feelings that it can drag on. I'm still considering the changes to this one a little. It's also got revamped hitboxes now! The players is still the same, but enemies now have larger more accurate hitboxes. This fix was added courtesy of PeachClamNines help! It makes the minigame feel a lot better on it's own.

Other than minigames, of course there's other good new stuff. 

One feature I'm pretty happy with is new protagonist customization options. It's purely cosmetic but you now have a couple choices for how you look (including the original in the new pixel style of course.) as well as how characters will refer to you as in reference to Ellie. (Boyfriend, Girlfriend, Partner, basically.)

But really where's the fun in sharing everything right now?

I'm not going to lie and say the update is right around the corner. I'd like to have it done as soon as I can, but I'm not going to rush it right now either. I'm going to try picking up the pace once the holidays are over, until then I'm going to keep chipping at it.

Thanks for reading if you got this far! I hope you're doing well, and thank you again for playing our silly game.