Hi everyone!

The wait is almost over. I am happy to announce that Chapter 1 of The Last Embrace will be released next week! Here are the dates:

• October 17th - Gold and Diamond (4K version)
• October 21st - Silver
• October 24th - Bronze

So exactly two months since prologue release on same days!

The game will be available on my Patreon and Oppaiman pages for all supporters.

Before I move on with the report, I wish to personally thank all of the supporters who have stick with me through the development of Chapter 1, your support means everything and helps the project keep moving forward and improving!

Also a special thanx to some of my fellow devs as well: Moonfire Games, for promoting and testing of the game and also Omega Games for allowing us to participate in their Itch ''Keep NSFW Alive'' Bundle as well as all of the other 40 fellow devs who participated which helped us a lot with funding and also bringing in new eyes on the project!

Now, what you can expect in this chapter:

• 607 renders (849 total)
• 4 lewd animations (8 total)
• 42645 words (56337 total)
• 5022 lines of dialogue (5973 total)
• 2.7 hours of reading (3.5 hours total)
• 4 new music tracks (15 total)
• 6 new SFX (19 total)
• new translations (Spanish and French, AI translated-feedback welcome)
• gallery rework consisting of 30 normal and 6 custom entries
• prologue render fixes

I will drop a full changelog next week prior to the release so you can see in more detail about new changes.

With that out of the way, on to the dev log itself!

It has certainly been an interesting month of development. But the chapter is fully finished now with testing and bug fixes currently underway. We had some pitfalls to overcome with rendering and especially in animation front, which I'm still not very comfortable doing, Daz is just a pain in the but to work with when it comes to animations. That said, in chapter 1 you will be able to hopefully see some improvement as I'm learning new things. For one, this time I didn't use templates for animations, I made them completely from scratch one frame at a time. While far from perfect, I am happy that I was able to learn something new during this process and I would like to think that progress has been made. This time, animation focus was on optional FMM interaction on solo path only this time around. Unfortunately due to my aging hardware animations are very difficult for me to get right and take a long time to render so it will likely always be a low number of them, at least for now but we will see what the future holds.

In rendering front, 607 total new still renders have been made, that is a significant increase for me compared to the prologue which had 230. These are all unique, so no repeats! It was an extra work for me but I ultimately think it was worth the extra effort even though as a result the update took longer than I originally anticipated.

This update consists of 12 new locations which you will able to visit with our protagonist! One of these locations in particular I did a lot of manual customization on (the bar) and I have put together an entire neighborhood around it which will serve as some locations in the future as well. This was a bit taxing for my aging hardware to render out but I managed in the end to get it done even though I had to make some sacrifices in order to do so due to memory constrains. Personally I would have liked to do more but it is what it is.

In terms of characters, In this chapter you will be able to find 4 new main characters and 6 new support characters. Here are the main 4:

Yuna especially, is the most custom of them who as you see has a lot of tattoos and piercings that I have manually placed, and she will have a special feature in this VN where she will have different hairstyle with each new update she will be in (I have written this into her character story).

In terms of story delivery, as you see from statistics, this time around most of it will be through dialogue rather than narration like it was the case in the prologue and I tried to keep these interactions to be believable as possible. Even added some crude humor here and there.

The story of this chapter will focus on acclimating the MC to the modern world with Clara as her guide and getting to know some fresh faces who will be in this story. Some new background stories about these characters will be revealed and also some possible hints about the future story may be dropped so I encourage you to pay attention and feel free to speculate. Second part of the chapter will focus on the mystery element where some things will also be revealed and the overall story will start to take shape.

Overall, this chapter is roughly three times larger than what prologue was. While originally I wanted to keep every chapter to about an hour long, in this chapter I had much to say and reveal, not only about the characters but also where the story may be heading. That said, don't expect every future chapter to be this long, some will be longer like this one but some may be shorter like the prologue but I'm always trying to have at least an hour worth of reading. This time we are close to three hours depending on your reading speed. Ofc, this is across all paths so it's safer to say that it is about 1 hour per path.

In this chapter you will have to start juggling your Good vs. Evil points as well as relationship points, some of which will be given automatically as you play and some you can gain or lose depending on choices. The result of these choices you make in chapter 1 will already play a big role in chapter 2 and going forward depending on path so be careful as there will be lasting future impacts depending on them and your story going forward could be significantly different depending on points and chosen path. Good and Evil points will be especially impactful going forward after this chapter is done and will work like a balancing scale meaning you will have to manage both or tip the scale more to the one or the other side so you have to pay attention and chose the path you really want, you have been warned. Solo path story will be the most impacted by this scale meaning in the future it will split further into new branches while Clara romance and Clara Spiral/Miles romance paths will be fixed meaning if you are on either of those paths your course is already set and Good/Evil points won't have much of a noticeable impact until the very end.

I have also started implementing some translations onto the game. Currently, Spanish and French are in. They are however machine (AI) translated so there could be errors so feedback on these is welcome. If these do well, I may add more in the future chapters. As of now I don't have anyone to proofread them but I'm looking into getting someone.

Well, in short, that's about it for this chapter. I hope you guys like it and where the story is going. As always, feedback and constructive criticism is welcome, it is the only way for me to know if people are happy with what is there and if any adjustments or fixes need to be made. After all, I'm just one guy so It's very possible I could miss something that others might catch so feel free to express any concerns, bugs etc. you may have found during your play. I am pretty much always available to reach out on our official Discord server if you got anything to report or feedback and questions to give.

Take care everyone!

NoX Productions