Sorry for the delay in getting this update post out.

The last few weeks have been pretty rough for Megatokyo. The health of Fred’s parents has gone into steep decline since the latter part of last year, and especially over the last month or two. His father has a bad case of Parkinsons, to the point where he has difficultly eating and making himself understood. His mother’s increasing dementia has made her mean and uncooperative (as sometimes happens), which has made her other serious health problems more difficult to handle. Fred had been spending a lot of time trying to help them live independently, and is now dealing with the hospitals, lawyers, care workers, accountants, city hall, and others as they try to move his mother into long-term care and arrange their affairs accordingly. This has made progress slow on all of Fred’s projects, including the comic and visual novel. Fred still has some things to do there over the next couple of weeks, but he’s through the worst of it now and should be back to regular production soon.

Fred did make some progress on the visual novel though. He drew some new computer backgrounds for the scenes in Tsubasa’s apartment that bracket BakaQuake. And he also drew Hitomi-chan, who is from the game that Piro is playing the next morning. Shadow added some nice animations for when Piro checks and deletes all his emails (including Yuki’s). Next up should be our first scenes at Megagamers.

The BakaQuake scene itself got off to a slow start as we struggled to find textures and a game engine that would do what we want and didn’t have legal or IP issues. We think we have that figured out now, and Java has things moving forward. We don’t have any good screenshots to show for this update, but hopefully next time.

Fred also drew a couple more character development sketches. There was a very nice Asako in a Dr Strangelove tribute, and also DollGirl who’s helping with rebuilding the Cave of Evil after Largo’s weaponized rickroll.

I would like to apologize for the current state of the visual novel forum. It is so overwhelmed with bot-spam that I just couldn’t keep up with it. I have been in despair over what to do. We’re going to try to put our heads together in a couple of weeks and see whether we need to nuke it and start over, or if there is some way we can salvage some of it.

As always, you can watch Fred work on the visual novel, comic, and other stuff live on Twitch. Join us for the live draws. They’re a lot of fun.

Sorry this is taking so long. Thank you very much for your patience and support.