Glad to hear Rachel's new design seems to be for the better! Heather was the last character needed for changes and she's done now too.
Some general information for the upcoming public release of update 0.11 it's not seen in update 0.10, but the sprites and other image related files have received compressing and converted to better file types that fit their select roles. Things as bg's and cg's being jpg's, while sprites were compressed png's.
One issue that came up with update 0.11 with the above, is that sprites were compressed in a not so perfect way. Resulting in some subtle shadow and color issues between expressions at times. Once again, subtle. But still I felt it wasn't as polished or nice looking as I'd want for the game and so as part of the upcoming update 0.12 for supporters, part of that will feature a better method that I was able to figure out. (I'm not the best with photo editing by any means.)
By using photoshop, I found that I can resize the sprite expressions down to what sizes are used in the engine. This method lets me keep the quality of the original aspect, as it's being scaled down and I've done quite a bit of testing side by side, layer on top of layer with the original expression files vs these new resized versions. I can't see any difference, if I had to be very picky I'd say there's maybe a 1% at most difference in quality. That's being really harsh though, as it really isn't even like that.
This does mean that it's not compressing as much as if I were to up right convert these files and let programs mess with how the color is handled, etc. So it does add a little extra to the game's file size, but it's not anywhere near how bad it's been and has plenty of future proofing to work with.
I'm not going to say that photoshop resizing is the best method for converting or downsizing expressions for sprites. <.< As I'm sure there's better methods and I'd still be open to suggestions, it's simply what I was able to find that did work for myself without the mentioned issues with colors and shadows between expressions.
So to quickly make my point. Both update 0.11 public and update 0.12 for supporters will share the newly adjusted sprite expressions done to the engine. Simply put, it feels right over all before our kickstarter launch at the end of July to have the public version showing a good example of what the game has to offer. By then we'll have days 1-19 open to the public once the kickstarter begins, which light spoilers.
So it'll act as a very good preview window for the game to see how the writing comes off, character growth, interest, etc.
Some light other news that will have to wait for public, update 0.12 for supporters will feature it's very first custom made music track, days 18 & 19, 4 new bg's and 1 new cg scene (featuring all the main girls).