Animated sprites. So small news, I'm still working on the VN. I am having some hiccups with GPU being a bit older (I'm on a GTX 1660 ti which is on the lower end when doing a lot of rendering.) so its a bit slow but still steadily progressing. I might be able to upgrade soon if things work out.

Anyway, I had a few experiments with animated sprites, see below:

I tested this on an android build and the same issues are there, but the FPS surprisingly holds well(Samsung A12) so I think this could be lightweight enough for mobile.

IF/When I get these to a certain level of polish I'll put them in-game but sparingly. I still prefer the full screen CG stills over sprite but the sprites are quite useful and are reusable so they definitely have a place here. There will be some parts of the visual novel in the future updates where you hang-out with choice characters in places we've already been to and just talk. Those are perfect situations where these would be perfect. In the long run, being able to reuse these sprites will allow me to spare some space and keep the game size smaller. Of course, important scenes will still be full screen CGs. (IF you're thinking full-screen movies, I'm not yet sure about those at this point because of some technical stuff that I can't share, but we'll see.)

 I was hoping next update was this month but I'm really lagging behind, on that front. I had to rearrange some bits of the script, particularly some important parts that come immediately in the next update so I will have to give a tentative ETA of September for Early access on that.