Hoo boy, here we go again! Let's get to it!

Overview: Since tackling some of the background assets back in...March? (has it been that long..?) We finally set aside time last month to get back into building the next chapter of The Ritual. I think we managed to get about 15 hours of coding/scripting/art assets under our belt, which felt like a lot in the moment, but still hasn't got us through half of what I'd initially planned to be the whole chapter (Ch1 was 7 cutscenes total, Ch2 was suppose to be closer to 15, of which we've scripted about 9?)

"Why is he talking about Ch2 in was's and supposed-to-be's?" I hear you asking...

Over this weekend, I realized that the story I'd hashed out for Chapter 2 kinda jumped over some natural progress-beats of the MC's journey into the world of "Arcane Apprenticeship." And the main plotline I'd worked out might honestly be better served as the framework for Chapter 3.

"What does that mean for Chapter 2, though?", I also hear you asking...

I think about half what I've made so far can be easily slotted into the new plan for Chapter 2, which - admittedly - hasn't been outlined yet, but I have a few key scenes I want to plan around. I think this should work out well in the long run, since I'll just be able to take the other half of what I cooked up in May, and pull it off the shelf for Chapter 3, whenever I get started on that...

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Art Assets: I did also do some work re-mapping character assets to (hopefully) make "animating" scenes easier in the future. I'll probably go back through Chapter 1 to re-animate those scenes with the new assets, so I can eventually clean out old, unused ones, but we'll see how much of Chapter 2's progress get's done this month.

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That's pretty much it for now! I found a pretty decent workflow of getting VN progress done once all my Patreon dedications were complete for the month, so hopefully we'll continue that progress this month. Unfortunately, that means new progress likely won't start until at least 2-3 weeks from now, so I probably will only be doing one update on the game per month. In the meantime, thanks as always for bearing with us, and stay tuned!

--SA