When I originally decided on where the demo would end, it was unfinished. The way that I had developed the story routes required new character art and location art, and I had just finished 6 characters, their 3-4 variations, their 7+ facial expressions per character, and at least 11 initial locations. I wasn't interested in starting up my graphics program again because I was exhausted.

A few months later, which surmounts to around a week or two ago, I decided that I needed to change that. The demo was meant to showcase what the game offered, and leaving it unfinished was a problem I had to address. So I set out to do so.

1. Currently, I'm developing 5 NEW locations to finalize the demo, new as in they were not originally planned for the game, as well as the art for 6 side characters, 2 of which are new and weren't originally planned for the game. This brings up the location art count to 36 planned locations, with 31 being regularly accessible to the player, and currently 5 that are only able to be seen through unique story's.
2. Izumi has been given 2 more variations to his work and regular day outfit to fit within his story. The secret character has been given an additional variation to their character art to fit within their story.
3. As it stands, the stories for the first 6 characters are somewhat "vanilla", in that they are easy to get through. While most visual novels revolve around a central plot point, the goal of Rainbow Heartbeats is to make friends and relationships, the game is open ended and outside of making friends, there is no clear plot. Later on, there will be characters will varying degrees of story and friendship/romance complexity, and the first six introduced, Alex, Mee, Izumi, Rey, Onny, and the first secret character, will be the easiest characters to befriend and romance.
4. You will not be able to be "best friends" with a character until version 0.1/0.2. I haven't decided where I'd like to implement this but it will be early on.
5. Due to developing the rest of the demo properly, there are additional sound effects, songs, and basic graphics, that will need to be developed. I'm getting artwork done with right now, so I won't be working on sounds/sonds/graphics until after the new locations and side characters are finished.
6. I'll be poking around with my VA's to try and get lines here soon, it's been a couple months and I still only have 2 character's lines.
7. I'm working on putting together the second video devlog for Rainbow Heartbeats, I have a lot of footage right now, mostly just me drawing for literal hours, but progress is progress and footage is footage.
8. My day job continues to drag. Not to be dramatic but they've hit a new low with dropping their employee morale straight off a cliff, so my days kind of blur together in one depressive mess, where they only pleasure I get out of my time being awake is the 3 hours leading up to my shift, when I'm deving, relaxing, or doing anything except being a slave to the thing that pays my bills. It's kind of bumming me out, which is why a lot of my tasks are taking longer to do than I would like, depression and negativity are truly a force to be reckoned with when it comes to getting anything except being a mopey mess accomplished. Long story short, it's hard to stay motivated when you expect to wake up, and go to a job that treats you like absolute dog crap. I'm sure a lot of you can relate.
9. When the story routes are completed, I'll be working on implementing more functions, like saving/loading and an options menu. I put off doing this because I was focusing on getting the core gameplay loop finalized first.
10. After all that is done, I'll be going into the testing phase, initially starting with only testing the game with Unity, then I'll build the game and work off of finding bugs from there. If you'd like to help out by playtesting, send me a message here, or through my Twitter, where I try to post regular updates.