Life as Designed, the romance and coming-of-age story featuring Cho Fukuda, is now available for purchase! Cho Fukuda has spent much of her adult life as a freelance costume designer, to the point that she feels like she's been typecast. Her motivation to work on projects that all feel the same flounders until she ends up botching a commission, leaving her with no leads and the feeling that she's made a mistake with her life. With Cho out of a job for the time being, she and her girlfriend will soon have to explore how their love will adjust to this new challenge. Taking place about ten years after the events of Eldritch Academy, this visual novel continues the story of Cho Fukuda and her friends Akomi Miyazaki, Kagami Nakayama, and Yue Ishikami. (Some knowledge of Eldritch Academy is recommended, but not required to understand this story.) This game explores how the direction of Cho's life might change depending on who is her pillar of support, including an unlockable bonus route that depicts a relationship not seen in Eldritch Academy. Each of the three main routes has two endings, with neither of them being more or less valid than the other.

Life as Designed, the romance and coming-of-age story featuring Cho Fukuda, will be releasing on XX XX! The planned price is $6 USD or the converted equivalent.

The demo version of Life as Designed is now available for download! In this demo, you can play through the first three scenes of each of the main routes. Also, the original announcement for the demo on my blog featured a few other announcements as well, which you can find here. In particular, the post introduces Mysteries of Akiramine, a series of short stories that focuses on Shizuka Hirose (from Shireishi and Eldritch University). I hope everyone enjoys the demo! Which character's story will you try first?

It's been a long time since the last update, but v8 is finally here! The main focus this time is the addition of more side stories, showing relationships between existing characters while also introducing the new character Sakura. There's also a bonus mode that behaves like a simplified dating sim, which allows the player to set up scenarios about their favorite pairings. Changes/Additions for v8:

• Added the side stories "Blooming Flower", "Rekindled", and "Roommates"
• Added "Sim Akiramine" to the side story menu
• All main stories are now named in the story menu (instead of just showing the focus character's name)
• "Music Test" feature added to the Config menu

• At least one more side story
• Tweaks and fixes

In order to gauge what level of interest there might be in potential features and such for the games set in the Nightshade universe, I've put together a short survey. The survey can be found here: link Just to be clear, the only features that are currently planned for certain are:

• Eldritch Academy v3 update
• Additional stories for Flowering Nightshade
• Life as Designed for PC/Android

While I've tried to spend the last few months weaning myself off overworking on my writing to avoid burnout (thus the delays to v8 and my other projects), I've still done a lot of tinkering with Python and Ren'Py. Recently, that tinkering resulted in something that I almost feel could be worth expanding into a bonus feature for Flowering Nightshade. The working title: "Sim Akiramine". It's a simple dating sim that features the characters from Flowering Nightshade, allowing the player to pair off characters that may not get much screentime together otherwise. (Or just "continue" the stories of existing couples...) Here's how it works (as of right now): After starting the dating sim via the side stories menu, the player picks a character to play as. This list includes every character in the game, even the side stories. (So if you wanted to play as Yae, you can do so.) After that, the player spends each turn performing activities (to raise stats) or going on dates (to improve relationships).
The stats that can be raised are:

• Hobbies; represents how well the character can entertain herself and others
• Devotion; represents the character's ability to commit in the long term
• Humor; represents the character's ability to keep positive

• Friendship; represents how well the two characters get along and enjoy their time together, 4 ranks, tied to Hobbies stat
• Attraction; represents how physically/romantically interested the characters are in each other, 3 ranks, tied to Devotion stat

Last year, I announced that Eldritch Academy was getting a major update for Version 3. After a lot of on-and-off work, that update is nearing completion. In the meantime, I figured it was time to give a better look at the update while the last chunk is implemented. For that reason, I'm planning to make a beta branch for the game here on Steam once I've double-checked the common route for any major bugs or issues.

What's in the Version 3 Beta?

• Prologue/Act 1/Act 2/Act 3: Implemented
• Act 4/Epilogue: Art not implemented, script under review
• Aftermath stories (standalone): Implemented
• Bonus Features: Implemented

How do I access the beta?

• Right-clicking on Eldritch Academy in your library and selecting Properties
• Navigate to the Betas tab
• Select the v3 beta branch and apply your selection

When will this beta be available?

What's different about Version 3?

• Resolution, UI, and art changes
• New (custom) BGM tracks
• Common route script changes (particularly involving choices)
• Redundant scenes removed or combined

It was brought to my attention that loading a saved game doesn't track achievement progress within Steam. It seems that the progress was being saved, but the connection to the Steam backend was being lost when the game reloaded. With this hotfix, the game should now set up all of the backend information on bootup, rather than when a story is started. Hopefully this will fix the issue, while also granting any achievements that were missed while the bug was in place.

A small update to the game to make sure the Prologue story counts as completed after being read. For some reason, one of the v6 -> v7 changes would skip over the step that marks the Prologue as read, so that check is now made earlier to try to avoid that issue.

Flowering Nightshade (v7) is now available for download via Steam! Check out its store page here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1652030/ Almost five years have passed since Himeka sought friendship and romance at Solana Academy. She and her friends have grown now, and have to face their adult responsibilities. As a direct sequel to Blooming Nightshade, Flowering Nightshade continues the lighthearted romance story that began there. The player may choose to resume one of the six romantic storylines from Blooming Nightshade or begin a story featuring a new character.

Features

• 6 returning love interests, with stories focusing on the transition to adulthood and maintaining long-term relationships
• A new character and storyline
• Each story is longer and more focused than the story routes seen in Blooming Nightshade

The store page for Flowering Nightshade is now visible! Go here to learn more about the game as it is prepared to launch on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1652030/ Due to recent updates to the Ren'Py engine and some code that needs to be updated to properly track Steam Achievements, the game will probably be made available on Steam with the v7 update. The current plan is to have the update ready sometime this summer. I hope everyone looks forward to seeing the game come to Steam!