Sweet Leaves - Sweet Leaves Dev Update - November 2026

Happy November. Less happy switching to standard time, if you live in an area that does it (ugh). Here's your November update on our progress:

While I vastly prefer summer to any other season, I do have an appreciation for the colder nights and things becoming more autumny. It makes things like going to a McMenamins property and sitting next to the fireplace while writing feel like---

...an insanely cozy, yellow-warm experience. It's a 100% match for my vibe. Anyway...

Over the past weekend (with the help of the ultra coziness mentioned above), I finally finished the second draft of the longest scene in the entire episode, which is probably the most important one in the entire episode. It took many weeks of tweaking and revising and waiting for ideas to come to me to finish draft 2. From here onward, none of the writing work ahead feels daunting. Getting over the hump of Scene 17 (the one I'm talking about) feels like a big accomplishment. And man, there's some gooooood stuff in this focal point and it's going to emotionally wreck a bunch of people (or so I hope). This scene also has one of the most bittersweet, emotional pieces of piano I've ever heard (hats off to AJMW, our composer). I have seriously cried to it. Even better, following that in the same scene is my favorite heartwarming tune on the soundtrack.

I can feel the downhill momentum now. Just a few more scenes to go (well, 8) but they'll be easier to write than the batch I just got through and will go faster. Plus, a couple of them are just cutscenes, so there's very little writing to do for those. TL;DR - feeling really good about this area right now!

Not much to show (or that I can) here, because spoilers and such, buuuuut I'll show off a couple things. We've got a new sprite for a small part; you might remember this colorful gentleman as the person who texted Red in the early hours of the morning, named Ludecker:

And a little teensey preview for a CG that will be animated and have some silliness (and probably a unique lil' theme song for it) - those among you who are pop culturists can probably identify the reference:

... but the whole thing that springing-into-action-DinoToby co-stars in here is really gonna wow you guys. Who's his co-star? Stay tuned. :)

Here's a little preview of a no-context-given CG that will be animated; enjoy speculating what this might mean! Fun fact: This CG is officially referred to as the "London Undergroundass Map" by the team.

Lots of BGs still in the works, of course. Here's a little preview of a new one where we show a different angle of where Red and Melody meet one another; this background will be animated as well:

I realized the track that we had assigned to the afore-mentioned ultra-important scene was far too short. I've got it out to our musician for adding additional sections to make it six minutes long. This will make it by far our longest piece of music, about double the length of the next longest track. I reeeeally wanna share a preview of it, but it's such a powerful pairing to the emotionality of the scene that I don't want to spoil it.

We'll be launching a fundraiser for this in a few months; more to come. All of the original voice actors who voiced characters in the previous Sweet Leaves webcomics are onboard to reprise their roles. Looks like we will have voiced narration as an option in the final version; we will give readers complete control over their audio experience, with separate sliders for narration, voice acting, foley/SFX, music, and cutscenes. We'll have 3 preset modes available for preselection (full VA + narration, VA+ no narration, no VA + no narration).

We're actually going to have two NSFW scenes now instead of one now. I invited Soul Nero to be a guest artist for a scene and he's graciously accepted. This second scene will be written by MidoriDeer (our editor) and I'll do the editing for it (basically the writing staff pulling a switcheroo for this one scene). Both of these scenes are M/M. For those looking for F/F scenes, don't worry, those are planned for episode 3/4.

As a reminder, NSFW scenes will be an optional DLC; no story is missed if you don't see these scenes.

Cookbook update: We're not going to be finished by MFF; we're trying for an FC (Further Confusion) release, which is mid-late January now. It's actively being worked on, just needs a bit more time to... yeah. I won't say it.

Thanks for your patience while we continue toiling away. It's taking time, but it's starting to come together and feel really good, and it's only going to get better from here. See you next month for another update!

- August