So, I ended up taking a month or so off and I'm going to be honest, I actually did do a lot of I.C.O. work in that time mostly because I had nothing else to do. But now, I think I can take things back into high gear again and really focus on making something now. Since it's been a while, I guess I can elucidate you on a few things about Chapter 5 of I.C.O.

-Chapter 5 will be named 'Blazing'

-It will be another 2 part chapter like 'Elicit' and part 1 currently stands at around 850 lines of writing. (Rough estimate excluding writer's notes and bits of programming)

-We will meet another new character.

Furthermore, Chapter 4 'Comrade' has also received a few noteworthy changes, notably to Grace's character and some dialogue I found clunky. I might go over that in a future post.

I would also like to show you something else...

"Hey, Judah! I'm naked!"

New sprites! But this isn't JUST a new sprites again. I'll be trying to make the new sprites composite sprites this time. I HOPE that this will be the final sprite update since honestly, I keep going back on old artwork all the time to fix it and I think I need to put an end to it somewhere. But I think I have a good enough excuse for making the sprites composite this time that I decided it would be worth to update the look alongside it. If you don't know what a composite sprite is, it's basically making every part of the sprite a different image that ren'py puts together. It really helps with customization and lowering of file sizes.

I.C.O. is a very art demanding VN and I feel I do waste a lot of time just redoing artwork from before and honestly it does get pretty tiring. But I just don't feel my older backgrounds are exactly up to snuff and they look jarring in my opinion. I'm wondering if I could hire a background artist or something in the future while Cody and I focus on CGs and characters. I dunno, would need to look into that. But anyways, I think that'll be a good enough progress report of sorts. Going to try to get it out by the end of this month at the very least but it may take some time so who knows. I'm glad to be back at least and I really hope to deliver the best update possible. 

    Thank you SO much for your continued patience and I'll see you soon! 

-Cetus <3