Flying High

Steadily soaring along.
It's been a while since I posted one of these, so let's get started. Development has been moving on at a fantastic pace these past few months, and I wanted to share a little bit about what's been going on with the team and me. We've officially completed 1/3rd of the development cycle at the time of posting this. We've added a new gameplay element, CG's, and animations.
In this post, we're gonna do a run-through of all the new things to expect from WS and hopefully build some excitement as we enter the second half of development.

The world is alive.
Recently, we finally completed implementing background animations. The animations themselves go a long way to really distill a sense of life in the world of WS.  While you play through the main story, keep your eyes on the backgrounds and watch as several things unfold as you play.
From airplanes taking off, leaves blowing outside windows, and birds flying through the sunny skies, the town is more alive than ever before!

We've also added special sprite animations as well.  Sprites will now hop, slide, dip, and move across the screen at certain times which makes them feel far less stiff than they originally were.
Although not many of these are on display currently, you can catch a few of them in the recently updated public demo!
The sun glare spoken of in the last update had to be pushed back in order to rework and better polish how it works alongside the new animations, but at this point in time, we still have plans to integrate it fully into the final game.
It just might take a little while for us to get to that point.

Special Scenes are in!
Along with animations, we've reached the point in active development that CG's have finally been implemented.
Over the course of the game, there'll be a handful of these scattered across the story of WS, each representing pivotal moments in the main adventure.
We've had these CG's on the backburner for a long time, so to finally get to the point where we're seeing them trickle in is an amazing feeling for the dev team.                                                                                                                         

   

Although none of these CG's are on display in the public demo, you'll be able to catch an early glimpse of them by checking out community WS streams, and game tester builds.

Affinity/Mental system
Alongside the investigation system that has been part of WS since day one, we've now implemented a new "Affinity/mental" system to add another layer of interactive gameplay into WS.
The system itself is pretty simple. Now, players have a way to check their affinity with Ayumi. Before players simply had to guesstimate and there was no clear signal as to how much affinity one had.
By clicking the bird logo on the text box, a small amount of dialogue will play that gives you an idea of how Ayumi is feeling towards Shouta.
This should help players in determining if the choices they've been making were good ones.

Alongside this is the mental part of the system.
During the main story, Ayumi's mental state is in constant strain. At certain points, that strain reaches a fever pitch, and she breaks down.
When one of these moments is reached, the player has the option to console her by again clicking the bird logo after a brief animation plays.
Consoling Ayumi in the correct way leads to her calming down, and a small boost to her affinity towards you. Failing to console her, or consoling her incorrectly will lead to her mental state straining a bit more, and a negative hit to your affinity.
Although simple at its core, we felt this system was a welcome addition to the core gameplay loop of WS.

That's all for now!
With every little update, we get closer to our goal of a finished narrative experience.
Things have been moving at a much faster pace than ever before, and we're so happy to be able to share with everyone the new changes we have made over the course of the last few months.
Everything is finally being implemented, and slowly coming together.
We hope you all are as excited as we are for when the time comes we can give a proper release date for the project!
Stay tuned!

Afterward

We're always looking for more people to help us get the word out.
If you have a YouTuber/streamer that might be interested in playing WS, please let us know!
We'd love to contact them!

Please consider joining our discord!
It's our main form of communication to our fans, and those expecting news about WS
https://discord.gg/7CGdsJc