Hey - Dev Here,
It's been a very... veeery long time since the last update here. Let's get a bit into the details, so you know where all the time went, especially since it's been five months since the last update.
Tooltips, Dialogs, Mentor and other:
One month got soaked up by the entire display system for tooltips and such. There was a lot of redundant code, which was horrible to maintain and eventually We needed another ui instance to show you poneh zen info. And that was the point where I realized that this needs to be fixed. Changing that introduced a lot of bugs in systems, which needed to be squashed. We also used that time to solve a few problems with the tooltip position and such. For example, the mentor to tell you about the game wasn't noticeable enough and I have seen players never learning a few basics and struggling as a result.
Poneh Zen:
Even though the basics were set in December, Poneh Zen required a lot more time to function properly. About one or two months were all about tuning that minigame with more user feedback, controls, ui and also ensuring that every zen as part of crafting was perfectly solvable. The last big step was to implement the Poneh Zen as part of the crafting. And suddenly another one or two months went by.
Crafting:
This was a huge chunk, which easily ate another month of the limited time available to us. Crafting in the last version was basically irrelevant. No matter how much time you spend grinding and crafting in the early levels, later levels would give you much stronger base items. To solve that we overhauled the entire crafting tree and the items you find. We also added flavor texts and better dummy item graphics. Lastly the crafting had to be merged with the Poneh Zen. With the next update you get to see all these changes in action.
Dialogs:
The last big part of what took time were the dialogs. We didn't add any new dialog content but we had to massively improve our workflow with creating dialogs. That took us the remaining time but it will likely save us a lot of time in the future. Additionally we have the finished concepts for visual novel style dialog graphics - you know, having big artwork of the characters when they talk. That is much better than having these small portrait circles.
What's next?
Our next plan is to work much more on the dialog content. The current dialogs are very rudimentary and only the bare minimum. We have seen commented gameplay videos by people and we noticed how much fun they have with the Antagonist and how much more interaction you want with the waifus. So that's our focus for the next time. In the meantime we put up new Unstable Builds and a bit later a proper demo update.
So yeah - Thank you for your patience and have fun ^^