Happy New Year, everyone! I'm back with some more news on development and the game. This one will be quick, as I'm currently preparing to go in for surgery tomorrow. After surgery, I'll be drugged up for a while, so I thought it'd be better to get things out of the way now.

So, first things first, let's talk about the game-breaking bug that has pushed things back. Essentially, we have narrowed down the bug to the time management code. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure the bugs causing havoc are due to how the new character information is stored. Somewhere in the pipeline, I believe the time management code is trying to reference information within a character data structure that doesn't exist. I still need to find which line is causing this and why, but I'm much closer to finally removing this bug.

Next, I want to talk about the game's backgrounds. Some of you may know that I've been having issues with getting backgrounds done for the game. First, the original artist began charging more and more for each background. At first, it was $50 per background, but as the game progressed, they raised it to $200 per background (USD). This has made it unaffordable to get backgrounds from them. Second, finding an artist to replace them has been a headache. Either the artist doesn't want to work on an NSFW game, or they don't have the skills to create backgrounds of the same quality as in the game. Currently, I'm looking into using AI image generation to solve this issue. Ideally, I'll be able to generate backgrounds similar to the games, and then I can hire an artist to "touch up" and correct any issues with the image. I'm not a big fan of AI art in video games, but I feel like this is the best solution to remedy the issue.

I'm going to leave this update here for now. I'd like to thank everyone for their continued support, and I hope to get back to working on the game after my surgery.