It's official - Absolution now exists in a shared universe with Heart Fragment: here's how

First of all, I apologize for the lack of updates. There haven't been many changes made to the demo since my last update since I was focusing on writing for week 5 - and I'm nearly done, so I'll move on to the routes soon.

Shared universe? Crossover? What..?

While working on week 5, I announced on tumblr (@navypinkdev) that I was accepting OC submissions from fans to appear in one scene in the game as cameo appearances. I was very happy when the developer of Heart Fragment said he'd like to participate, and thrilled when he submitted his game's antagonist and major character, Jasper, to make that cameo appearance. I asked him if he'd consider it canon to his game, and after some discussion, we settled that it's possible for our games to coexist in the same universe and that Jasper's appearance in Absolution is the perfect opportunity for setting up a piece of his backstory that you otherwise wouldn't know about. 

If you're a fan of Absolution and you haven't checked out Heart Fragment yet, give it a try - the demo has received a major revamp recently and it's so much fun - as a tester of that game, I can confidently say that it's going in a fascinating direction and I can't wait to see what happens with some of the characters.

Development progress

As I mentioned, I've been writing week 5's common story. I have one scene left until I can call it complete, as week 5 gets very tricky and there was a lot of stuff to write and branches to test that I didn't even account for at the start. But I'm getting there. The last scene I need should be linear (unless I come up with something crazy while writing it) and fairly short, so I don't think it's going to be all that difficult to write. The past few days I got ahead of myself and wrote a major week 6 event which serves as the final route split of the common story, so that's out of the way. I will probably come up with some week 6 events to write once I finish 5  but they'll definitely be less complex than week 5 (now that I think about it, I doubt even the endings will be as convoluted as week 5's events...) <- on that note, I'm really close to the end of the common story. Crazy, huh?

At the moment I'm kind of switching back and forth between assets, writing and code. I'm not sure what I'll be doing next but I keep telling myself it's best to focus on writing. With Jasper's cameo out of the way I can announce that I've started hiring voice actors for the nurse cameos in the event with Jasper - my first experiences with VA have been really positive so far and I can't wait to get the other characters' scripts done so I can open auditions!

Minor demo update

I figured now is a good time for a long overdue demo update. I realized I never published a build with the much needed improved patient selection screen. Have fun!

Personal update

We got back to school at the start of the month, and 1.5 week later I catch a cold. Nice.

Since I'm sitting at home recovering, I might actually get more stuff done soon. We'll see.