Hello everyone! Sorry if it took us a while to update the game, a lot happened in the past few months.
If you've been following along on our development updates through our Twitter and Discord, you probably already know that our Ukrainian artist is currently in a very precarious position in his home country. He doesn't have continued access to the Internet and even electricity's getting scarcer and scarcer for him and his family, which obviously means he's in no position to keep in contact with us (let alone work on the project). As such, until the situation improves, we have no way of publishing new main story chapters for the game, as we require new sprites, backgrounds, and complex scenes that he is simply in no position to work on or transmit to us.
However, we didn't come this far just to let a war stop us. Until our artist can safely return to us, we just have to adapt to the situation at hand and come up with new solutions to our problems. This led us to the creation of our first Side Story, which explores some of Mary's past while only reusing old game assets. This was very hard for us to accomplish and there are some things we wish we could've done better, but for now, we're proud of what we've been able to accomplish, and we hope you'll find it an engaging read as well.
To access this Side Story, you can either:
-Access the Chapter Select screen by selecting "New Game" from the Main Menu, answering "No" to the prompt, then scrolling to the bottom; or
-Reach the end of Chapter 9 (the last main story chapter we added in the last build of the game), where you'll be given a prompt to either go back to the Main Menu or continue to the Side Story after completion.
Other changes of note are some additional music tracks added to the game (including a new theme for Mary herself, which is meant to replace the old one) and some minor typo fixes and general improvements to past chapters (which aren't worth revisiting for). We also made the 32-Bit launcher of the game available to users with 32-Bit PCs. We're working on making the Mac version of the game available to Steam users as well, but we're having some troubles in that regard. Hopefully nothing we can't resolve in the future.
We hope the next build of the game won't take as long as this one did, and that our artist can safely come back to us in the near future. Until then, stay safe!