Blog 2025-06-30

Update time! Let's start with the usual, then get to the more interesting stuff.

Website

The software used to build this website has been updated from Ghost v5.115.0 to v5.127.2.

Like usual, there shouldn't be any notable changes, and hopefully nothing has broken.

Sable's Grimoire 2

Another 3 months have passed. So what's been done since the last update?

Store images

If you've visited the Steam page for Sable's Grimoire 2 lately, you might have noticed that the capsule and hero/header images have changed.

For a long time the capsule images were the Amadronia Academy background with the Sable's Grimoire 2 logo plastered on it, and the hero image was a CG from After Story.

The new images are below (capsule image) and above in the feature graphic of this post (hero image).

Progress

New images are nice and all, but what about the game itself?

First up, 3 more music tracks have been completed, and the remaining tracks are close to completion. So hopefully the music will soon be crossed off the to-do list.

In terms of artwork, nothing much has changed. That's because the art is more or less done already, and I was waiting until certain scenes were finished before commissioning the last 2 CGs. Those scenes have now been written, and work on those CGs will begin soon.

As for the writing and general production, I'd been planning to focus on Koko's route next, followed by the common route. Instead, I wound up starting with the common route. The character routes can't be fully completed until the common route is, so I thought it was better to proceed in this manner.

I ended up spending a lot of time working on the common route, and organizing the game as a whole. The result of this is that the common route and the individual character routes have been linked up, and the path forward is much clearer than it was before. Sable's route and the common route are more cleanly split now as well, and the way that different routes branch has been sorted out.

Progress has been made on the actual writing as well. But honestly, getting everything more organized was the bigger win. It's a boring and tedious part of game development which becomes more important the bigger a game becomes. For a long, branching game like Sable's Grimoire 2, it's a relief to cross that off.

What's next?

With the organizational stuff out of the way I'll be free to focus more on the writing and programming, while the commissioned artists and musicians finish up their parts.

For the writing, I'll try to finish off as much of the common route as I can. I expect to have a lot more spare time over the next few months, so I'm hoping to get a significant amount of writing done over that time. My goal is to finish the writing for the common route before the next update.

For the programming, I'll be redoing the route map code from the first game to make it work with this one (and to make it better/more generic in general), and updating parts of the GUI to make it more controller-friendly. I'll also be working on better Steam Deck support.

Other than that, the code itself shouldn't need much work. Most of the coding for a game like this is done within the script. Since I do the writing myself, the majority of the coding is done simultaneously while the script is written.

So with any luck, a few different parts of the game should be finished off by the next update. There's still plenty to be done, but things are proceeding smoothly right now.