Hello everyone!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! We hope that 2026 will be another fruitful year of Stand By Me, and that all our players will have a wonderful year ahead ^^<3 Though we didn't manage to fund our project in 2025, we are grateful for the past year in establishing a bigger player base/ awareness, and for the growth of our project!
Progress Overview
We've done plenty of work over the past month. We are pleased to announce that we have finished updating all the base maps and optimising the events for up till the published demo, and are already beginning to code new content. Writing for the newer content is also going well, in particular the Free Day gameplay!
The work on the custom NPCs has now proceeded, and we are extremely excited to show off the updated sprites as they are created! Please see some previews below of both the new maps and NPCs for some shop interiors.
Music
We've built up a sizeable library of custom tracks as of now, with 22 tracks and coumting by both our composers Project Lights and Dama! We believe that the custom tracks really adds to the immersion of our world, and hope that you guys like it as much as we do. We are waiting on our vocal OP (in Japanese, to suit Project Lights' comfort) and a few more BGM tracks at the moment.
QOL Improvements
Finally, we've refined our custom plugin to include some of the changes that we've promised you guys previously in our pledge to deliver a better project/ Kickstarter in future:
1. Save during choices --> Now you can simply press X and open the menu to save during choices!
2. Working menus during messages --> The Affection menu and Social Stats menu, previously broken when opened during dialogue, now works seamlessly with a return to message when they are closed.
We'd also like to update that unfortunately our plugin developer has stepped down after completing the above project, so we will need to look for a new developer to fulfill our remaining plugins such as CG Gallery, Social stats/Affection points adjustment etc. Let us know if you have any contacts for this xD
Despite the significant financial investment for all of these changes, we believe that we are many steps closer to realising our true vision for this project, and we are beyond excited to show them off when the time comes. Until then!
Thank you for your support as always!
Love,
fishattic games.