It's been a minute since I posted an update. 

I've been hard at work on the game though, and I'm almost finished with the first draft of the first day!

With any luck this will be the initial demo version. 

I am a little torn on what to do with the release however. I have an unfortunate amount of AI assets most of which I didn't know were AI originally, but I've been using them as placeholders while developing to keep things flowing and track the visual aspect. Most of which were from asset packs I purchased online, and some were from a VN builder tool that I was testing, and neither were clear about their use of AI until I had already purchased them. 

Part of me wants to not release any version, even a temporary one, with any AI involved. Doing this means I either have to wait to release the demo much later this year once I can afford enough art to make the game playable, or I could strip it down to barebones and just have very empty feeling placeholder images in place that get replaced over time by official artwork.

I could use the AI assets and release a temporary version of the demo, so that it at least has a little artistic life to it while waiting on the official art, but part of me feels like that would taint the project to a level that I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. I dunno, feel free to weigh in on this in the comments.

In more exciting news, I do have some preliminary art from a few artists that look great! I'm still trying to decide who I'm going to hire for the character art, but I have a BG artist that is already putting in great work! 

I still have a chunk of stuff to write, but I'm on the final scene of the day and it shouldn't take much longer to get that written out. The demo is closer than ever to being a reality, and I'm pretty stoked to see where things go from here.