Hey all, It is June 3rd. Which means yet another devlog.

Before we begin, happy pride month! The gayest time of year that I'm sure one way or another we all celebrate in some capacity. The world may be in a rough state at the moment, but stay strong!

This month has been waaaay busier than I'd have liked. And unfortunately I didn't have much time to work on the game I'd have liked this month… But I still managed to make massive progress on it, and I am now entering the final stages for the first build to be released.

Writing Update: It's 95% done, everything has been coded in and the game is in a playable state. As I have mentioned prior, I set the scope for the first build way too high, the first release will be 100k words and I know for a fact that I will be breaking the next builds into much smaller parts…  At the very least, you'll have a lot to chew through for the first build.

Art update: This one was a doozy. Pierce, Theodore and Jakub all had updated sprites made for them this month. I decided to give them one more once over before release just to make sure they were in a solid state before release. 

Eric also had a whole new sprite made for him. I had actually made a couple more sprites for him between now and the last time I talked about him, but I ultimately decided not to share them, as they all suffered the same issues as most of my art of the time. That being said, you can *really* tell the anatomy improvements with his new sprite, and hopefully it sticks.

Lastly, a last minute partially new character reveal: Blake. A bit of a small history lesson: originally I had envisioned this game having a fat Orca Bartender in it… But as development went I ended up passing on that idea and instead went with a Coyote design that ended up becoming Mordecai. 

However, when it came to redrawing his sprite to fit current standards, I was largely left unsatisfied with it and ultimately decided to go back to the fat Orca design, which brings me to Blake. I like to think this sprite came out phenomenally, probably the nicest looking character in the game if I'm being honest. 

You'll meet him when the game releases, as usual.

As for what needs to be done still: Noland is getting some revisions to his design still, (notice that he is completely absent from these images: this is why.) I also have got one more round of small edits and proofreading for typos to do, so you'll have to bear with me a little longer on this.

I'm setting a tentative release window of June 14th - June 16th. This'll give 2 more weeks to polish up everything, then once these are done: the first build will be ready to ship.

(As a sidenote, here is a link to the page. Future devlogs will probably be posted over there: https://the-final-bear.itch.io/blood-in-the-water)

Otherwise, see you again in two weeks. If you have any questions or just want to chat, message me @final_bear or join the discord server (Which is still up), and farewell.