This week has been entirely focused on writing. As I mentioned in my last update, my sister was in the final stages of her pregnancy—and the very next day, she had the baby! It’s been an exciting (and busy) time for my family, and while I’ve had little time to work on creative tasks, I’ve managed to sneak in working on bits of a new character design. It’s unrelated to this update, though, so I’ll keep it under wraps for now.

My biggest focus—and challenge—has been writing. Liora’s support conversations have been sitting half-finished for weeks, and I realized I needed to write the script for her quest first to give those conversations the context they needed. Most of today has been spent tackling that, and I’m happy to report the quest script is finished! 

I’ve started importing it into the game’s scenes and, while there’s still more work to do—like polishing, writing bad endings, and fleshing out alternate dialogue—I now have a solid foundation to expand upon.

There isn’t much to share visually this week, but if you missed it, I did post some Castlevania fan art on Patreon and my socials. 

https://bsky.app/profile/mkru.bsky.social/post/3lfxm74hdpc2p

https://bsky.app/profile/mkru.bsky.social/post/3lfvbcr4z2c2k

I’m really happy with how they turned out, so go take a look if you haven’t yet!

That’s all for this week. Until next time, everyone!

Hey everyone! This week has been a bit of a challenging one, and I’ll admit it’s been hard to get much done. Monday hit me like a truck—I got fairly sick and returned to my day job, which was overloaded with extra work since it was the first day back after winter break. On top of that, I attempted to stick to the classic New Year’s resolution of returning to my gym routine after a few months off, but honestly, I just ended up feeling overwhelmed.

To add to the chaos, my family and I have been helping my sister as she enters the last stages of her pregnancy. It’s a wonderful time, but it’s also a big responsibility, so I’ve had hardly any time to focus on writing the script for the Dryad quest, which was my main goal for the week.

Despite all of this, I made the most of what energy and time I had. I cleaned up some visual glitches that were reported to me over the past week and added Liora’s dialogue and party events to the database. These tasks are fairly straightforward, so I could manage them even when I wasn’t feeling at my best. I also made more designs for the Dryusk, which I’m excited to share with you:
The last design I shared showed the Dryusk from behind, but now, with these before-and-after images, you can see more of the horrifying physical changes that occur when someone is turned into one. The Dryusk’s belly swells as it nurtures the Dryad sapling within them, which eventually takes on their form.

I’ve got the full resolution PNGs available to my $5 patrons now if you’d like to see a non GIF version:

https://www.patreon.com/c/MKRUdesign

I’m still working on the bad ending sequence I previewed last week, but since it has a few alternate versions, I wasn’t able to finish it in time for this update. My goal is to have it completed by next week’s update, assuming I can balance everything with my responsibilities to my sister and the baby. Family always comes first, after all.

The next few months are going to be a big challenge, but I’m committed to chipping away at this update bit by bit. Thank you all for your understanding and for your support—it means so much to me.

Until next week, everyone!