Hey there! I'm doing very well, thank you for asking. The roller coaster I had mentioned further down in these comments several months ago has smoothed out quite a bit.  My life outside of the game has settled into a much better version of normal than before it, and I'm very grateful for that change.

I also have a bit of exciting news to share regarding progress on the next update. At this point I can say with a very high degree of confidence that v0.8 will release later this year.

The next update's play time and file size has significantly exceeded my initial expectations. v0.8 will add about 10 hours of play time and clock in just shy of 10 gigabytes once unzipped (8gb comes just from this new release). It's very exciting to be transitioning into the phase where I'm tying up loose ends, crossing t's and dotting i's, and all that fun stuff. 

I'll tell you now, we're still easily over a month away from launch. But for now I am focusing in on the remaining tasks on my rapidly shrinking to-do list— and boy does that feel good.

Hey, thanks for that! Unfortunately, this is the only social media presence I maintain. You're always welcome to drop in and check on the game or the developer. Couldn't help but notice the Riley thumbnail, by the way. Is that fan art? Very cool!

I appreciate you saying so. Being able to build characters that come alive to the point where players have visceral, emotional reactions to their personality (especially negative, to be honest) is one of the most flattering comments a visual novel developer could hear.

Hey there, thanks for dropping by again! Things are going well here. Wrapping up yet another event this week in the last large grouping of them, and I'm starting to think I might see a pin prick of light at the end of the tunnel.

The development time of what's left is hard to predict because I've never attempted something like what I'm trying to build with these last handful of events. Thankfully, I gave myself opportunities to practice some of the techniques in a few of the events leading up to the final few.

And yes, that description is vague and probably won't mean much to anyone until they play v0.8, but suffice to say I'm trying pretty hard to make something special.

Time flies, doesn't it? Almost a whole calendar year since the last release! And sitting courtside to the evolution of these characters across that year has been so much fun.

The massive checklist for v0.8 continues to be chipped away at. Just last week I finished all renders and music for one of the largest events (~20 minutes) in this series, and that felt like a great milestone. 

Thanks for checking in again. I'm sure some of the folks who occasionally lurk around here waiting for updates from the dev appreciate your consistency in reaching out, seeing as I usually do respond.  

Hey Sim!

Life outside of Perfect Pitch has been a bit of a roller coaster lately, and I'll leave it at that. Even so, I'm managing to keep up with development at a respectable pace despite it all.

One of the upsides of the roller coaster is that I'll be taking somewhat of a brief sabbatical (i.e. vacation) to western Europe where I plan on visiting some of the sites important to the world of classical music. A few concerts, a few museums, a brief bit of time spent living where it all went down— I'm really looking forward to that.

As for the progress of the game, again, not much news to share at the moment. I've been dedicating a lot of time to understanding and iterating on animation within Chara Studio, which has led to some great breakthroughs for the upcoming release, but obviously it's also a time investment. I think when the update finally does go live you'll agree it was time well spent.

Hey, Sim! Great to hear from you again.

Just want to make it clear though that the next update is definitely not coming out in January. I'll likely post an addendum to my "Not dead; just busy" dev log in the new year with a little more info, but v0.8 is still a looong ways away. Still on track and going well, but the update is enormous.

Thanks for offering your honest review of the project. 

Hello there! Thanks for stopping by.

To be honest, the idea of creating and managing a discord community for this game has never appealed to me, so I think it is very unlikely that it would ever happen. As for typos, I'd ask that you please direct those to the bugs/errors devlog. Thanks again!

All three of the S-wing marching band girls did, plus Elaine! In fact, the only girl introduced in the v0.7 version who hasn't marched corps is Taylor, but I'm pretty sure I only ever canonize the groups of those four, Kara, and Sam.

Thanks! That bit was quite a learning experience-- one I'm excited to build upon for the next release. Also a great plug for some of the incredible and often under-appreciated works by female composers. Clara Schumann has some bangers and that's just one of them.

Hi there.

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the first issue involving the use of the escape key. When I was testing this a couple months ago, I noticed there were some issues when using multiple custom screens at once, e.g. MC's dorm computer AND the new event menu on a different layer. That should be fixed, and a quick test I just ran on my copy seems to back that up. Do you notice the same issue when right clicking with a mouse?

As for the relationship menu vs event menu, that's simply a compromise I made with the roll out of the new UI. The new event menu and original relationship menu don't get along, so I hid the event menu any time you're on the relationships tab. Bringing it back is as easy as navigating to any of the other tabs.

I'm not a ren'py expert, so if you or anyone else has an idea for how to get around that issue I'm all ears. Spent a solid couple weeks of trial and error, browsing forums, no dice.

Hey there, thanks for the suggestions. To be honest with you I hadn't ever considered making any follow ups to the sleepover mini-events, but it's a fine idea. In some ways, when I built the sleepovers, I built in five nights' worth of novelty for a player: three clothing choices plus the unique event and repeatable event. As time goes on and I revisit older material, that might be a good warm up for heavier events. Into the back pocket.

MC's doing just fine. Dandy, really. He's just a little sleep deprived, that's all. Nothing serious. In fact, he's started taking melatonin every night before bed and he swears he can tell the difference already.

Hi there, thanks for coming by to say hello! It's been a while since I posted, so I'm happy to give you a bit to chew on until the next release.

0.7 is going great so far, tons of fun to develop. I'm quite happy with how the new events and the UI overhaul are both shaping up. We're looking at more than a month but less than two until the next update. 

Render quality is a big personal focus for this update. I've been spending some time practicing batch processing in my photo editing software of choice and also studying up on lighting techniques in film. This has allowed me to produce more (and better looking images) faster. I'll include a before-and-after example of what the result of this "dressing up" process looks like post render. 

I'll save the whole unifying theme idea behind v0.7 for the release's devlog. Suffice to say these updates are always kind of a smattering of ideas, anyways. But in this case my top priority was to lay the groundwork for what is to come in the v0.8 release. Savvy players may be able to read between the lines of content included 0.7 to see what I mean by that. I'll also include the thumbnail I plan to use for the next update to give you some sort of clue as to where this is headed.

Hopefully this is enough to assure you and anyone else reading that I'm still very much involved with the development of this project.

Glad you could come check it out. It's going to be a while before the next one, although 0.7 will be an appreciably larger update than the rest. I do feel confident that the time investment will be adequately reflected in the overall quality of the next release. Thanks!