Plans for 0.65

Hello everyone! I hope you're having a fantastic day and a good weekend!
Here's our plans for the upcoming version 0.65.

Writing:
The completion of Kate's romance route, we're expecting to finally reach the end of Kate's route this version and then for 0.66 we'll be moving into working on Violet's route. Hopefully with plans to finish Violet's route and begin the next route this year!

Artwork:
As things are progressing it's looking like we'll be completing the CG Scenes for the Bakery this update, but I said that about the last two updates so I'm not going to repeat the same thing here. Unexpected events can happen that'll slow down development so expect all the Bakery CGs to be finished with his update, but don't hold your breath.
Also not sure if you've noticed but new patreon banner!!

Technical:
Over the past week I was looking into file compression and image compression formats to see if I could effectively make the smallest version of the game and hopefully bring back the "Lite" builds that we used to have which were smaller in size, but had a lot of compression artifact that I wasn't happy with so we retired it.
During this time I discovered that JPEG XL had the most significant image file compression while preserving a majority of the detail without any glaring artifacts. However, Ren'py, and the majority of programs, do not support this file type so that was a dead end.

So I went on to the next best thing. .WEBP, which on average was about 60KB larger than .jxl, but is supported by Ren'py. So I spent the time converting and compressing all the images in the game to .webp, refactored the code to point to .webp instead of .png, and with the addition of 7ZIP compression on top of that, got the game down to 472MB from 2.2GB.
While there is still a loss of detail if you scrutinize the two image versions back to back it doesn't have the "gradient artifacting" that past .png compression did.

So if you have very slow internet or your storage situation needs you to be conscious of every megabyte stored on your drives then you can DOWNLOAD the experimental "lite" build for 0.64 right now on the standard download post for Windows & Linux only.

Be warned that it is experimental, not properly tested, and may require a persistent data wipe.

Thank you!
-Hizor