To kick our first post for 2024 off! I'd like to let our $0 subscribers/followers know that our initial development report posted at the start of a new month will always be free to view, but any other news posts is typically part of our higher support tiers, plus the more exciting benefits.

This isn't meant to beat you guys down by any means! ^^" We're just getting our posting schedule back to normal, where December was the exception to this due to the whole Patreon purge that happened.

We'd love to consider feedback though about our supporting tiers on substar. If you have interest in supporting our active game development, but for some reason unknown to us, you can't or on the fence. We'd like to better understand if there's anything we can personally do to make the experience better or improve our quality of posts and benefits. <3

With that said...

I'd like to once again thank everyone who decided to support us during December in response to the abdl Patreon purge. If for any reason, you're still being billed by Patreon for pages to some abdl creators. I'd double check if they're even there anymore, because many big names in the community were hit and have reported some people were finding themselves billed for December, despite their creator not having a active Patreon page after the purge took place. >.<

Wrapping back to my thanks to everyone... We ended up reaching $700 of our $900 funding goal during December! <3 This will cover our team's costs for their skills in development during this month and any funding that we collect from January will cover February's development costs. So, we do encourage anyone that can spare it, to support us even at $5 tier as you'll receive plenty of goodies in the month that's exclusive and help keep content flowing along with new releases without having to cut anything.

Putting that aside for a moment. I'd also like to thank everyone for bearing with us despite everything. It was a rough December and I had wanted to get more content delivered, but there was a number of factors on top of the busy holidays that made it difficult. >.<

That's why we're looking to begin 2024 with a pretty hefty month of content for our game releases and we'll dive into our plans on that below!

[~Messy Studios Team~]

[~Dev Plans & Story~]

In case you missed our last post in 2023, we're beginning 2024 with a new programmer who joined us. Our previous programmer let me know during November that they had too much going on with other projects and dipped, so our old buddy Artie who had his hands tied with his own game currently stepped in. Artie helped where possible during November and December, giving me enough time to seek out a long term, solid programmer to interview and prepare for the long road ahead in 2024.

As of today, I've sent over the needed assets, details and plans to the new programmer to officially begin the continuation of game development on MA releases!

Our rough plan for the next 4 weeks is as follows, but please take these dates as a estimate and not a confirmed date. We'll try to let everyone know at least 24 hours prior to releases that content is coming out.

v0.20 pt 2 (+Bridget scene) [Release estimate: Jan 8-12th] [Public Free]
v0.20 pt 3 (3 scenes) [Release estimate: Jan 8-12th] [Supporter Exclusive]

v0.20 pt 3 (3 scenes) [Release estimate: Jan 22-26th] [Public Free]
v0.20 pt 4 (4 scenes) [Release estimate: Jan 22-26th] [Supporter Exclusive]

If the content is ready before these dates, we'll send out a 24 hour warning and release them sooner than listed. We want to get this content out as quickly as possible, just as much as you all wish to enjoy it! ^^

I've also mentioned it in great detail in other posts last month, but we are releasing fairly good sized content again on a monthly basis. Every month will present at least 12,000-15,000 word count worth of new content. This might include bonus content in the form of our QOL (Quality of Life) fixes being applied to earlier existing content in the same month.

We're trying to set the expectation on what we can realistically develop in 30 days, while balancing life, school and everything else around the project. Even with that said, what you receive in a given month should be well worth the support at $5+ <3

Our estimated goal for ending January and heading into February will be to officially move onto v0.21's content which is confirmed to include Miki's ep 6 route content and we're still deciding on which other route episode to include for that month.

Let's check what our plans are to kick off 2024 for the rest of the team!

[~Programming~]

I still have to check what they wish to go by, but for now.. "Programmer" will begin January off with fixing two major bug/issues presented with MA recently. One of which will make many happy and us included, as it's been a long time with it being broken!

The first bug/issue being fixed is the Android mobile support! This will be ready with the rest of v0.20 pt 3's content forward! When talking with Artie and examining what's wrong with our Android exported builds, it would seem our previous programmer in the past had messed with some coding within the mobile section of the Ren'py project is our guess.

The second bug/issue being fixed is the textbox hide ui button (aka the little x button). Currently, if you click it, the button functions and does what it's supposed to.. Hide the textbox ui in order to let players view cg art or any art for a while without anything in the way. The issue is while the textbox ui is hidden, if you click anywhere on the screen besides the check mark icon to return the textbox back to normal. It'll cause the game to crash with an error.

We wanted to get these issues settled right away and it'll be a decent way to test drive the programmers knowledge and skills with solving coding issues for the game.

Then from there, they'll dive right into adding the rest of episode 5 content into the game during the month and we'll play test that, make sure it's functioning as intended with no issues! (Fingers crossed)

(We'd like to introduce more exciting, impactful choices when revisiting earlier content to apply QOL fixes. In some fitting moments, we will be looking into the addition of changing out simple choices for built-in mini-games or other engaging interaction other than simple choices.)

[~CG art~]

MarxeDP & AjoseMP will be working on adjusting some old cg art into the finalized style still, but we're also having them include new animations for some old and new cg art that we'll share during the month!

Of course, we'll also get some new cg art started and shared too! The new art that we're working on will ensure the art team stays ahead of what we release, that way we're not waiting on them to provide us with the art ideally.

We'd love to hear everyone's feedback when it comes to cg art and spoilers. How does everyone feel about us sharing previews of cg art that's months ahead of release date? For example: We have much of the ep 6 route cg art ready already, so new art might be ep 7 route focused and that might include some heavy spoilers. 

I'll look into substar options to see if there's a method to spoiler images at least for now to be safe.

[~Sprite art~]

Lisa will begin 2024 with working on a pretty top secret and highly subjective related sprite... I can't say much about what this entails right now, because I don't want to worry anyone until we can provide concept visuals to really pair up with our in-depth plans with this...

But, just know that it's been something we've been thinking about for a long time for MA and with a lot of considering for how to handle it realistically from a development standpoint without major conflicts with other art.

If our reveal of the concept visuals goes well, it should make a lot of people really happy. There might even be more encouragement for some people who have been on the fence or slightly interested in MA in the past, but put off by something to play the game or support us.

That's all I can share about this topic for now, stay tuned for news on this concept visual reveal later this month!

[~GUI~]

ds-sans is in the middle of finishing up the history/log screen and once that's finished this month. They will then begin work on some adjustments to the textbox ui elements and visuals, cg gallery or title screen assets!

We're inching closer to being finished with the gui, so we're pretty excited with that! ^^ 

[~Ending~]

We have quite a bit of exciting stuff going on for January to not only kick off the New Year! But we also want to prove ourselves with getting things moving along once again in the past 2 months up to this point!

If this is your first time joining along and you enjoy the project, please do consider supporting us on Subscribestar if you aren't already! Plenty of exclusive posts are made, at least 3 new posts every week or more!

Keep yourself informed and updated on development by following Subscribestar notifications or bookmarking our >Guide Post< You can also continue to keep updated through our Itch.io page or Twitter as well!

Be alert! The only websites that are officially ran by myself (Princess Bridget) and Messy Studios working on development of Messy Academy are from the following list below. Any place otherwise is unofficial and they might be impersonating us for their own gain. Avoid payments/donating to other sources as it won't be helping fund further development into our game!

>Subscribestar<
>Pixiv Fanbox<
>Kickstarter<
>Twitter<
>Itch.io<
>Pixiv<

(You can also find our official posts/account on these sites, but due to their nature we won't include links directly.)

>F95zone< (Username: Messy Studios)
>omorashi< (Username: Bridget1999)
>tapatalk< (Username: Messy Studios)

Be alert! The one and only official Discord server for following the Messy Studios team development is this one. >>Discord<< If you've come across any other server impersonating us, be sure to report your findings with me directly and steer other's interested in our video game project away from possibly scam attempts.

~ From all of us at Messy Studios! ~