I've returned and brought good news! :)

Hey,
I hope you're all doing great.

I'm really sorry for my lack of presence everywhere recently. It was caused due to my poor physical and mental health. I owe you an explanation, so I'm going to explain what happened to me.

It all started when my heating broke (coal furnace), in a way that needed complete redone, and it was the coldest of winter then. Even now it's barely around 15 Celcius during the day. I changed to a heat pump, although it took over a month to get heating to work in every room. As a result, I got sick fast. My sickness was bad, but not life-threatening. Sadly after recovering I got sick again within a week, even before I finished recovering. This time it was to the point of being bedridden, sleeping most of the time, and even when awake, being barely lucid. I don't really remember much from this period, time was flying fast, and at some point, I was no longer able to tell what day it was.

When my sickness was already recovering, it turned to the worse at one point. I was suspected to have cancer. Two years ago, my aunt died due to cancer, and last year my grandpa was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Thankfully, after more tests, the doctor came to the conclusion it was a baling tumor that got infected for whatever reason. He wasn't able to say for sure, so he sent me to another doctor that was specialized in the exact field. I managed to confirm this diagnosis a few days ago.

My mental state was really, really low at that time. That brought some good things, but about that later. I spent a lot of time wondering about the point of life, death, relationships, and the pain death causes to everyone around me. I wasn't really in a state for communicating with anyone. Even now, when I've finally physically overcome everything, my mind is still in low spirits, dejected, and dangerous. I'm getting better, though. No worries, guys.

Returning to the good things that my edgy state had brought - I got a lot of creative, good ideas on how to reward you for your support and consideration. I also learned how to continue on with Astral Lust in a better way than I initially planned. I got ideas for several crazy, and great events, a DLC for Patrons, and how to make a launcher for AL without renpy's limitations (AL was too big to auto-update without re-downloading everything).   I also got really interested in AI-generated art when I was trying to make an image to accompany a life story of Aharon I was writing for my supporters. As a result, I learned to make more and found many ways to help Astral Lust develop with it. First of all - card images. A lot of cards had images that I wasn't really keen on, but due to a lack of better alternatives I stuck with them. Now I can make new images for every card, to keep the style consistent. I like a lot of current images, though. So it's just a thought. But the bad images will certainly be replaced along with some other elements I find ugly.

I added some images between paragraphs, these were made by AI before being edited by me. I'll make a preview introducing their function in the game at another date, this post is really long already. I did this to make your reading more pleasant, I usually use emojis for this, but I couldn't find myself in a mood to place any there.

 
Have a nice day, everyone!

Announcements:

• 0.2.5-Alpha1 was released just before this post. All Alice's events now have NSFW sounds, with over 80 unique sounds added,
• 0.2.5-Alpha2 will be released within a week (it's almost done),
• 0.2.5-Beta will have RE: Village cosplay outfits added for Alice, Mina, Grace, and Lexi,
• 0.2.5-Beta will have story events for all the main girls!
• The next release will be 0.3.0 - and will include big changes, including the greatest combat rebalance I ever did, and give the players options at picking their own Extraordinary Pathway (class),
• The first DLC for supporters - The Black Emperor will be released along with 0.3.0. The description of it will come out later.

0.2.5-Alpha1 image.