I'm calling this the "chaos update."  Things have been a bit chaotic for much of the team this month, but sometimes that's just part of the creative process!

The Writing and Coding Department:

I've been learning that my writing process works best if I don't always try to stick to writing a single route in order. Sometimes I just get a great scene in my head and I need to write it out!  This means that I'm not able to post a neat "X Character: X Percentage Complete" chart like some devs with less chaotic brains than mine. But I'll do my best to indicate progress!

My main focus is still Robin's route, which is now scaffolded (think an outline on steroids, with descriptive paragraphs for each scene) and I'm filling in the scenes and dialogue. I'm carefully reviewing the choices in the route to make them both numerous and interesting. At various points, a Marion who is leaning more toward one personality type than the other (in Robin's route, a straightforward Marion who openly speaks her mind or a clever Marion who plays her cards more close to the chest) will have different thoughts or different dialogue with the other characters.  I hope this will make re-reads more interesting and also show how your choices really do shape Marion's personality.

I've also completed Geoffrey and Robin's lore stories for the Mega-Guide. If you're a beta backer and have joined our Discord server, you can find links to these two stories in the beta-chat topic. I've now completed all the lore stories except Alanna and Gui. They help me a lot with shaping up the characters for their in-game routes.

The Art Department:

Speaking of chaos, our lead artist Arrapso needed to take a little break from Robin this month and finished up Alanna's new sprite instead. Here's an Alanna series showing how the new sprite style lets us more easily create multiple poses.

Here's Alanna's basic pose and base expression.

Here she is with an alternate hairdo, a happy expression, and her lute-playing pose.

And here we have Combat Alanna!  You might notice this is a new background, as well. It's the Brambles, Nottingham's poorest district where Alanna grew up.

Many many thanks to our coding assistant Shawna, who helped me set up the layered sprites so that I can portray all these different poses in the game's code without typing a million words. 

Robin's base sprite is now complete, so we should have a full preview of him next month.

That's what we've got for November!  Unless you'd like a teeny tiny peek at the secret project that Sandra is working on right now.

Hmm, that eye does not look human...