I was planning on waiting until release for the next development update post, but I didn't want too much time to go by without sharing all the work that has been done. Much of the recent work has been dealing with the rescue at Castle Helmsworth and some of the confrontation and conflict that can arise there. there are a few choices you will make that can alter the playthrough as well as one which will end the update with your story taking two very different paths. This dual ending has added some extra work as I wanted to make sure that both choices lead to a similar amount of content and arrive at a similar level of resolution as far as the story goes. The two different paths that open up from this will set the tone for the 0.5.0 release which means a very different experience for you.

The extra scenes and dialogue from this branching is evident in the amount of dialogue added to the script since the last update. We have gone from 100,000 words to about 130,000 and grown the variety of scenes you will be seeing. As a result of the choices you make in this update and your previous ones the story has expanded in many places, resulting in this release being longer than any of the previous ones. It is also wider in a sense that many scenes have alternate versions that are unique to the different paths you are on and also your current relationship status with certain individuals.

Outside of the script and dialogue updates there has been a ton of work posing and rendering all the images needed for this release. I have added some preview images to this post. Other work done has been updates to the Renpy game engine to bring it to the most current version and take advantage of performance improvements and Steam timeline integration. I also purchased some large music composition assets and have been working on creating new songs and music for each scene.
I will wrap up this development post for now. Feel free to comment here or reach out on Discord with any questions or comments.