Greetings, fellow Kyosians!

We're happy to let you know that the work on Minotaur has been going well! I would also like to apologize for not posting the previous update here – I just haven’t realized that a forum post format can be used for that… So let me fix this oversight and get you up to speed!

We’re currently working on Thea's route - it's the second longest after Nod's, and it can be roughly divided into three big parts. We're now developing the second part, and we hope to finish the route in the middle of the year... This year : )

I've attached several screenshots of the scenes from the first two parts of the route. As you can see, it partially takes place in a winter location, so the screenshots include variants of Thea's new winter outfit. We wanted to make sure that she doesn't freeze to death - after all, we already tried to kill her once. Can you guess which one we picked?

You can also see some rooms of Royce building in there, but don't worry - Thea won't just follow in Nod's footsteps, and almost all locations that she's going to visit are either entirely new, or will be seen from a new angle, so to speak.

I wish I could share more screenshots with you, but it's a bit risky - now that Nod's route is out, they're full of spoilers! What I can tell you is that Thea will get her own skill, just like all other playable characters. Originally we didn't intend for her to have one, but since we want to keep the gameplay engaging and diverse, and Thea's route is quite long, we decided to spice things up a bit.

***MINOR SPOILER ALERT***

Without going into too much detail, Thea's skill will allow her to see the location that she's at from the outside (under certain conditions). You can see an example of the same location with and without Thea's skill enabled in the attached screenshots! We hope that this mechanic will give us an opportunity to use some pretty cool concepts visual, puzzle and story-wise.

***END MINOR SPOILERS!***

In parallel, we've been working on the improvements based on the feedback we got so far from our current development stage (huge thanks to everyone who provided it!) - like the chapter select screen, which has replaced character selection screen, and which will allow you to start from different parts of the game. I've attached a screenshot for you, although I had to block most of the screen - huge spoilers! Anyway, in addition to selecting where to start from, we want you to also be able to pick a set of choices that you've unlocked prior to that point. That way you won't need to replay the whole route, or even game, several times just to try various combinations of those choices. Let's try and save some of those poor kittens!

I'll be honest with you, this is NOT an easy screen to make, and it's still a work in progress... But I hope it'll make your navigation throughout the game much more convenient! Ideally, it will be complimented by a manual save system with the same feature, and perhaps later we will also add indicators for missed extras (cards, artwork and music) - this screen seems to be well-suited for that.

Some other things that we're working on based on feedback (that we plan to roll out with Thea's route):

– Proper output of Chinese language (without that horrible extra symbol bug - I'm really sorry that it turned out to be such a problem to fix!)

– Optimized elevator descent scene - some players had issues with it (up to the point of the game becoming unplayable), which is most likely caused by unoptimized assets and animations; we've decided to rebuild this sequence from scratch to address this

– Adjusted post-Bygone puzzle - it turned out to be very confusing, so we're replacing it with visual-based exploration (no text wall!)

– Some other minor bug fixes and improvements

Other requested features that we're keeping in mind (most likely for Mentor's route release or later):

– Gamepad/touch controls support

– Auto-dialogue option

And that's that! Let me know if you have any questions or comments, and we hope that you're looking forward to Thea's adventure!

Love ♡ Nick & u7committee