April Development Update
Added 2025-04-01 21:06:47 +0000 UTCHey folks,
Welcome to the april development update! I'm happy to report that work has generally been proceeding smoothly. At the time of this writing, chapter 2 is playable and essentially feature-complete minus some last-step polish (like color grading, below) that isn't possible without completed assets. Assets have been coming along great; all sprites are at least drafted and there are multiple finished backgrounds and CGs. No spoilers today, but there's some stuff in the works that I'm very excited for y'all to see.
In the last update, I talked about how the general goal is to go about 2-3 months between chapter launch and the beginning of the next chapter's beta. Based on current progress chapter 2 is very likely to fall within that margin, putting us somewhere in late April or May. Beta itself will run for a week plus however long it takes to implement any changes before the full patron build.
With all that being said, I have some exciting news about secondary updates to the project. In response to user feedback the settings menu has been reorganized and there will now be a dark mode option for the main menu. More importantly: With deep thanks to Maurimo (whose projects Whodunnit and Ediction you should check out!) for an enormous amount of guidance and technical assistance, sprites in UNDER | HEAVEN will now feature per-scene relighting and color grading! The technical side is a bit complicated, but to see what it means in practice just check out the attached screenshots of some chapter 1 scenes that have received a facelift. While this does increase the amount of work needed per update, at this time it is not expected to significantly impact release timing.
Speaking of disruptions to release timing, some last personal news is that I'll be moving sometime around May-June. This is not currently expected to impact development of chapters 2 or 3, but of course any big life change like that comes with some logistical- and financial- strain. If you feel inclined to support the project on Patreon or Itch, thank you; your support what makes this project possible.
That's all for this month!
See you around.
