Early Access 0.1643.1: CG Gallery Update and Take Turns Teaser?!

Details of the one-hundred and fifty-first early access release. For Cheesecake and above backers.

Heeey, cakes! Hope you're all having a lovely festive holiday~

We're ringing in the new year with some big bold decisions and a little surprise! First of all, and I think it's important to start with this, this release sees a big engine upgrade. Penlight is on Ren'Py 8 now, which I needed to run some new script. I'm hoping it doesn't raise any compatibility issues for any of you, but it might. So please let me know if this one crashes on load or something and I may be able to set you up with a version built in the old Ren'Py 7 I've been using all this time. This is going to be how Penlight is made going forward, though!

That's not the surprise though. That you've already seen in the title~

See, by "Take Turns" I'm sure many of you are aware I'm talking about the part in Nozomi's route where Kyou hands the penlight to her, and after she's had her fun, proposes the two of them take turns using it on each other. Agreeing takes us on a new story route (which I'll probably dub the "switch" route) that I'd seriously thought about scrapping for a long time. It felt like too much of a challenge to take on, so maybe it's unwise of me to attempt it. But it's not like I had any stellar ideas for the other unwritten routes at this time so what the hell, let's take a crack at it :D

There isn't a whole lot there at the moment, just the bare foundations, but I'm going to build on it as my first project of 2026 so I hope you look forward to what comes of this!

New art news is pretty thin on the ground, which seems pretty scrooge'y for the time of year I know, but it is what it is. I didn't have any new scenes that really merited an illustration, but I did add some art assets to illustrate a part of Sayori's Doll story path that occurs on Sunday where she and Kyou are in her room for the first time. I'm banking on the new Switch story to give us some more opportunities for compelling artwork, so that's all the more motivation to move that story forward~

And finally... there's another little surprise in store. It's something that surprised me, even! So it turns out my translator Waldo, unbeknownst to me, was dabbling in some Python and cooked up some new script for Penlight's CG gallery (the very same that necessitated this Renpy engine upgrade, actually). This adds some new functionality to the viewing experience that allows one to navigate back and forth between the images at will and back out of a CG set early which will be a real QoL boost for mobile users in particular. It's not fully implemented yet, but you'll be able to tell which CGs have the new functionality by the way they pop when you cursor over them. Yeah, that's something else he did too! Gosh, talk about going above and beyond for this game! Thanks so much for this, Waldo ♥

Wow. That's a lot of article. And to think I spent most of this month believing I'd have nothing to talk about! I didn't even mention the little bits I did to round off the work I was doing on Devotion last month!

Happy new year, everyone! See you in 2026 :)

UPDATE: New release 0.1643.1 brings the Spanish translation up to date and corrects a couple of typos and grammar errors in the English script.

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Penlight Flowchart Guide (Spoilers) (0.1643.1).png

Diagrama de Flujo Guía de Penlight (Spoilers) (0.1643.1).png

What's New

• WRITING: Updated the second thoughts ending for the Villainous Devotion storyline to include the choice where Kyou considers making Nozomi his girlfriend

• WRITING: Wrote a short conclusion for the Villainous Devotion "second thoughts" sub-path

• WRITING: First parts written for Nozomi's "Take Turns" (Switch) story path

• ART: New CG art added for Sayori's Doll storyline on day 7

• CODE: Updated Renpy version to 8.5.0

• UI: Added a navigation feature to some of the CGs in the image gallery (thanks Waldo!)

• Word count is now around 480,000

• LOCALIZATION: Various edits and corrections to the existing Spanish script

• Some typo and grammar corrections