Again, big apology to everyone for how quiet it's been—something personal happened and I needed to take some time off, and then I also had a long overseas work trip that sucked all my remaining time and energy.
I started editing, writing and coding again middle of last week, and have been slowly easing my way into things. This is sort of a stocktake of what my plans are after they were de-railed, but also some minor updates on the little things I've made progress on.
Pieced myself back together (lol)
Learnt how to use Ink/Inky (I love it! It's really elegant in my opinion, and I've been doing research on the integrations that are possible with Godot and Unity as well, which seem really exciting.)
Experimented with writing a small imaginative piece for City of Smoke and Shadows (read the concept here) on Ink/Inky (I might publish a sneak peek of what I did if you guys are interested?) just to get used to the programming language. Side bonus: learning and writing/coding something different really helped me reset/get into the groove of writing again.

Beefed up my Twine skills, and watched a bunch of tutorials!
And... it was my partner's birthday on 27 July! I made her a small personalized interactive fiction game and we were joking about how this could be a whole business idea, for other long-distance couples. Y'all tell me if this is a good idea :P (Of course we'd have to use twine/inky if it's actually gonna be a business).

Finally, I also did some editing (I know this is everyone's dreaded word lol) for Merry Crisis, simply because the paths/branching was getting out of control for the later chapters, and I realized that to get to the finish line on the game (and also have each path still feel satisfying, without major continuity breaks), I'd need to simplify.
Finish up the island visit (Chapter 6) of Merry Crisis. This will likely be a standalone (not linked to the previous chapter because I'm still editing how the chapters flow into each other, and fixing continuity breaks.
This will bring us to the major/final crisis of the story, and the resolution will happen in Chapter 7. (Final decisions will be made in Chapter 7, and Chapter 8 will be the Epilogue)