First of all, my apologies for not updating here as often as I should! Second, I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas and are ending this crazy year on a positive note!

Today I wanted to talk about some things I have learned in my journey while making Serenity, my first ever AVN. After version 0.4,  Serenity had grown beyond the 1gb filesize limit here. I had emailed support but they never responded (until last night). Consequently, I also learned from my good friend and fellow dev, Cryoxxx, that I was not compressing my images at all, even though I have been converting them to webp format. After learning of this, I reconverted all of Serenity's images with compression settings that I found to make a HUGE difference in the overall size of the game but with barely a noticeable change in quality. As a result, the zipped game is now a third of the size compared to before! Because of this new development, I can now upload Serenity here with no issues... but even better, the itch support have upgraded my 1gb limit to 2gb so now I have plenty of room to grow the story as I envision it!

Yesterday, version 0.6 was released to all of my patrons. Usually, I release to $5, $10, and $15 patrons first, $2 patrons 5 days later, and I make it public 5 days after that. However, for the last update of 2020, I decided to release it to all patrons and this version will go public on this Thursday, 31 December! On that day, I will upload Serenity here as well as on mega! So please keep an eye out for that.

Android APK:
Last night I was also finally successful in creating an android version (I think the issue I was having may have been due to the size of the game images). With that said, the APK will be uploaded here as well for those interested. Please be aware though: I do not own an android device and have no way to check it before release. I have a feeling with this first APK release, there may be issues viewing some videos due to the format I was using early on. This will be resolved for version 0.7 as I will be redoing the videos I can. If you play on android, I'd love to hear from you on your experience, especially with videos/animations and background music.

Version 0.7:
The next release, planned for the end of January 2021, will be a long one... or at least longer than the last few releases. My plan is to make version 0.7 the last release added to this build, which will become known as "Serenity: Week 1". Version 0.8 will start "Serenity: Week 2". Version 1.5 will start "Serenity: Week 3", and so on. Version numbers represent the in-game "Day" added.

Animations:
Hopefully some of you also follow my Patreon. I recently announced there that I have hired the services of Cryoxxx, developer of Oppai Odyssey, to do at least one animation per release. I will still create lewd scenes with still images also but animations are something everyone wants to see and I want them too. I have done a few simple animations but they just aren't as good as a seasoned dev like Cryoxxx can pull off. With the financial support I have received on Patreon, I am able to shell out some money to him in order to have that added quality in Serenity. He does fantastic work and I am very happy to have him in my corner. You will see his first animations added into version 0.6 (coming this Thursday publicly). Be sure to check out his game!

The story:
As your first week in Serenity closes, you'll be looking ahead to the arrival of Camilla. The end of version 0.6 hints at this, plus there is one image in the credits that is a sneak peek (spoiler) for what's to come. I've been asked by many how far Serenity will go. Well, that depends on how well it continues to be received... I have enough story already written to keep this going through at least 4 in-game weeks (28 days). If all goes to plan, Serenity once complete will be 4 separate builds. If interest starts to wane, that may change as I do have other project ideas waiting. Either way, I am here to stay as a developer of kinetic AVN's with a quality story.

That's all for now. Stay tuned and be sure you have alerts turned on from itch for the public release. I have been known to go public earlier than I say sometimes! Thank you very much for your support and for following my work. I appreciate all the messages of support and wanting me to keep going. I love all of you! :)

...Fire