Hey everyone! Your girl is still going through it in 2025 and now she's 

ULTRA UNEMPLOYED.  

That's right, I got laid off like a month ago. I'm trying not to make a big deal out of it, but if you're waiting on me for details about our upcoming speaker series or anything else that's big that's been pending-- It's probably been postponed for now until I can sort out my lack of general income situation.  That's the bad news.

The good news is that I'm expanding some of my old packs and working on things that have been sitting in my backlog for new packs and effects, and this is the first of them. 

 This is an expansion to the Simulated Lighting Shader

This includes a rewrite to the Simulated Lighting Shader replacing the old backlight vignette functionality with a positional rim light effect.  All of the existing transforms have been updated to include the change in functionality.  The old implementation is still there, and if you have any templates you've made that use it still, you can change the 'MakeVisualNovels.SimulatedLighting' shader declaration in your transforms to 'MakeVisualNovels.OldSimulatedLighting' to retain that functionality, though all of the transforms in MVNTemplates.rpy have been updated for the new version.

This expansion also includes...

1) The MouseLight function, which makes lights follow your mouse when used in transforms.

2) The Spotlight transform.  You can use this to drop a spotlight on a given X/Y. Example: camera at Spotlight(0.5,0.5) will put a spotlight effect in the center of your scene.

3) The Flashlight mode transform.  Assign to your camera and you can use it to let your players explore your scenes with a flashlight.  Great for more interactive segments and image maps!

That all said, this will likely be my last major addition to this pack, barring fixes,  QOL updates and documentation.  I am actively working on new shaders and special effects for RenPy, the previews for which I will not share here.  If you swing by my channel in Devtalk over at https://discord.gg/devtalk you can see some of the previews yourself or suggest new effects yourself!