Penlight - New Public Release 0.1302.2 (The Villainous Update)

Hey, everyone! 

I'm excited about this month's release because it's my most productive yet. This update adds an entire new route through the story with one consequential choice and is comparable to the existing two routes in length. 

Not only that, but I even threw in a preview of Nozomi's new-look sprite as well! Just start a new game and select to use the new sprites from the start to see it, although she'll look out of place in some scenes due to not having all her outfits yet. 

I'm not sure what people will make of the new villainous route. It's experimental for me in places and the writing is a little raw and first drafty, but I'm hopeful that overall it fits in with the rest of the game and will allow players to enjoy being unambiguously nasty despite never being let off the hook for it.

With this update the word count for Penlight is now around 62,500, up from about 40,000 last month. Despite any reaction this update gets I'm pretty pleased that I was able to put out a coherent bit of story of that size in about 3 weeks (the rest of Penlight's writing took 7 months). I don't know if I'll be able to keep up that level of productivity going forward, but I'll do my best~

Anyway, enjoy the new release! See you next month for more art upgrades and story additions ^.^

What's New

• New major route (Villainous) with two distinct story paths
• New sprite for Nozomi, albeit with limited functionality (selectable on game start)
• Added a few more assets; a couple new backgrounds, character expressions, sounds and a smartphone graphic, mostly to accommodate the villainous route
• Tweaked some of the dialogue in the two original routes, mostly to resolve inconsistencies created by the villainous route additions
• Changed the file format of the music to ogg from mp3, significantly reducing file size
• General spelling and grammar corrections