... Also a small update to expand functionality to extend statements.  To grab the free version until our fund raising is over, download the 'All of the above but free' package out of the demo section, which contains everything.  Once the fund raising is over, the individual files will be made free as well.

We reached our initial goal of $200, meaning we've got enough to start our next project, and we're well on our way to improving this one!

So there's a few things I haven't spoken about yet, which is to say 'What are you doing with the $200 and $500 goals?"

At $200, we'll be able to afford the things we need to start a new competitive jam!   Here's the core ideas behind it, with the desired outcomes in bold:

• This jam, instead of being used to create visual novels like our other jams, is focused on creating assets for visual novels. This will hopefully get more people creating tools and assets for visual novel developers in general, and empower those that already do.
• This jam will run at a time where it will create valuable assets for the community in time for 2 important events.  Namely, NaNoRenO, and 6 months before Spooktober Visual Novel Jam*.  The timeliness of the competition should hopefully position asset creators and developers in such a way where they both greatly benefit from it.
• The jam's winner will be determined by the entrants themselves in a closed rating system.  This is mostly to test out the concept without a large amount of administrative overhead, and may change before the jam starts depending on a number of factors.
• This jam will happen in February, starting February 1st, with the submission period ending February 15th and the jam ending entirely on the last day of February.   There's a bit of a dead zone for jams between the start of the new year and March.  February is a hard month to set up a jam in for a number of reasons, so this helps us fill the gap with hopefully a decent pay off for everyone involved.

*: Spooktober's rules will be changing to allow people to use publicly released premade assets that the developer themselves have made and released, as long as it was released 6 months prior to the start of Spooktober.  Previously if you released your own assets to the public, you couldn't use them at all even if other people could.

At $500, I've promised new features to be added to the Smart Barks system.  Here's what's planned if it hits $500:

• A Sound & Music Gallery interface for your visual novels to let your readers check out all of the audio in your game, calling back to a time where this was more common in video games.  This will come with a base design inspired by the default RenPy UI, a script that will read your audio directories and populate the menu for you, a way for you to lock/unlock the feature or just specific audio tracks as rewards.
• A set of tools to bulk edit audio files to adjust the volumes.  This is particularly useful if you use audio from multiple different sources, whether you're working with multiple voice actors or you're just downloading sound effects from different resource packs.

And, of course, if we reach our final goal of $1,000, we'll host a talk series and bring in audio professionals to give presentations on their subjects of expertise!

Thanks so much for your contributions thus far!  Lets keep making awesome visual novels together!

Oh also my name changed to Stella, I haven't updated all the pages yet but I'll get around to it.