Posted October 20, 2023 by Astralore
Hello! Thank you all for staying with us for so long and being so patient. We really appreciate it. ❤
As you might know if you’re in our discord or have read some of our older posts, our studio survives by working on other people’s games. This has left not much time or budget to work on our own games, which is why Monstrata inadvertently ended up on a four year hiatus. (Yeah, it’s… apparently really been that long. Wow.)
Aside from that, we ended up having issues with several of the people we tried to bring on to help the project happen. This caused us to lose progress we thought was done and adversely impacted our relationship with Monstrata's development.
We still don’t really have the budget to work on Monstrata but we do have a little bit of time sometimes and maybe slightly more organization now, so we’re slowly shaking off the dust and getting the project moving again. (And if we’re lucky, maybe one day it will be able to pay for itself a little! XD)
This next update is honestly massive. Is it 4-years-of-nothing massive? No, probably not. But it is definitely the biggest update to date.
Before I get into that, for context, let’s talk about the previous updates. Our first major two updates introduced Elsie and Vivietta, who brought with them 5,000 words and 7,000 words, respectively. After that, we had a common route update for Chapter 2, which was about 5,000 words.
And then we had Cailean’s Chapter 2 update, which was the biggest one to date with a solid 9,000 words, as well as five new side character silhouettes, a bunch of fancy camera work, and one new background. It was a big update!
9,000 words is a lot. But this next one, Elsie’s Ch2 update, has over half again as many, at a whopping 14,000 words. That’s more than twice our current average. Five new silhouettes? How about seven. One new background? Try thirty. Not including variations. And a whole new full sprite for Cailean’s brother.
(And the script for the one after that, Nikolai’s Ch2, is already close to 16,000 words and it’s not even done yet! Lord help us.)
For those who are still subscribed to our Patreon (bless you, you’re the real MVPs), you’ll be seeing some previews of this stuff coming in the next few weeks, which we are excited to share with you. c:
But when is the actual update coming out? I know, that’s what everyone actually wants to know!
For those subscribed to the Early Access tier of our Patreon, you’ll see the update one week from today, on 10/27/23, just in time for Halloween! We’re going to be putting everything we can into finishing it the way we would like in this last week, but regardless of what we get done on it, we’ll be pushing out the update on that day. So it may not be quite as finished as we’d prefer, but at least you’ll be playing it!
For everyone else, the public version will be released roughly a month later, with any changes that we didn’t finish in time for the Early Access version. So start looking for it around the last week of November!
Once again, thank you all so much for continuing to believe in the project. We’ll talk to you all again soon!
Special thanks to Noisyparker, Batteryfish, and Fishie78 for their current support of this update’s release! Special thanks as well to Tigress13, Wisp Pandemonium, Jada, Justis Dickson, Collin Douglas, Laurie, Halima Ellison, AlexTheVP, Treasure!, and Saffron for their past support. <3