Hello, everyone!
I hope all is going well, and that you spent a great holidays and New Year!

It's been some time, but the next story, Birds of the Salt Flat, is complete and released! It's a much more lighthearted story than the previous ones, so I hope it will be a bit of a breather between all the gloom. I also finished a new cover art for the project, and I'm pretty happy with how it looks!

I wanted to put very good care on this update so it comes with a few other things. Here's what it includes:

• NEW STORY: Birds of the Salt Flat. Now with character movement! Sometimes!
• A super short extra story: Instinct in Marble. (accessible after finishing Birds of the Salt Flat)
• Finally, animated title screen! It was way easier to make once I figured out how.

Other small updates:

• Font change
• Fixed some typos I had missed
• Reduced the weight of some files

With this new story, the development notes booklet has also been updated... by a lot! From 6 pages to... 24! Besides the content related to the new story, the PDF now includes character sheets and extra art for every story.

So far I think the new update should be compatible with previous save files, but there might be issues I have missed.
I considered adding a story unlock feature so the stories have to be played in a specific order, but until I know for sure everything works well, I prefer to let people read the stories in the order they want. If the order ends up more important later on, I'll try to implement it in a way that doesn't break the save files.

For the next story, I've got two plans:

• One is to make the next planned story, Gifts from Mother, which will take a bit of a depressing tone again. This one is mostly written, but will probably need quite a volume of art.
• The other is a special story I want to make for a specific day of this year. It doesn't have a final title yet, but it's related to one of my other released projects (hint!).

Depending on how things go, I'll release one first or the other, but I hope to finish both this year among all the other work I've got.

Before I focus on them, I'll take some time to work on the next update for cirrus, a game that has been waiting for it for a while. The juggling of projects never ends...!

Until then, see you next time!