Mice Tea [v1.0.0 Final] [Cinnamon Switch]

Much like the end of our other finished path, this update takes the form of an epilogue that wraps up our characters’ current predicament before showing some vignettes of how the experience has affected their lives and what their trajectory is going forward. There’s a lot that’s already changed for Maggie and Sylvia, and we imagine players are curious about where both will end up. We’ve enjoyed shepherding these characters to the end of their journey, and hope you all will too.

UBF has been working diligently to polish a lot of existing CGs and finish sketched CGs. They’re found all over the game, but the biggest is the CG shown here. You’ll have to replay Sylvia’s Day 3 content to see it, but now’s the best time yet to replay the scenario from the beginning.

We also have a sketched CG that ends the Sylvia path drawn by KD, and even in its early stage we think it’s a very rewarding conclusion to her story.

This month has a lot of new sprite art from new alternate forms of outfits for alternate forms of characters to new expressions to recolors of old outfits to a whole new outfit Sylvia wears for her final scene.

There’s also a new sprite for Tharkis in the Felicia ending. As a reminder, the text box can be hidden with the H button on your keyboard or using the mini menu on the bottom of the screen. You know, just in case you can’t quite see as much of her as you can compared to other characters.

Will’s been busy this month, treating us not only to two new songs, but also to our first batch of custom sound effects! The first track is an amped-up version of the sneaking theme found in Julie’s path when she and Margaret are on the run from the authorities. He also provided a new track for sexy scenes that don’t quite match the tender tone of the music we usually use for intimate CGs. You can find it being used in the more intense sex scenes found in the Julie and Gavin paths.

If that wasn’t enough, there are also new sound effects for Margaret’s phone, and the door chimes for Barlow’s and Tea Friends. All show up early in the game if you want the chance to hear them without digging around for them.

Heart really outdid herself this month with five backgrounds, which brings us to ZERO MSPaint-style placeholder backgrounds in the game. We know a lot of your found our old “Zeppo” backgrounds charming (we on the team did too) but we know you’ll agree that the new backgrounds are an amazing improvement. We have backgrounds for the gallery, Ricky’s Apartment, the back shelves of Tea Friends, the convention, and a new setting that appears in Sylvia’s ending. The use of color to create atmosphere in all of them are wonderful, and really help immerse players into the story we’ve created.

We took your votes in this month’s poll and passed them along to UBF to determine what pieces got completed. That means CGs for the intimate scenes ending Sylvia Day 4 and Gavin Day 4 were both finished for you to enjoy. Both are quite spicy and involve a lot of fun twists that take advantage of our characters’ transformed states. We hope you like them! There’s also a new CG by the artist MooMaid that appears in the story “Swine Flu,” one of the options in the Felicia Day 2 computer research scene. We thank Moomaid for contributing to the game!

Players will remember our new, overhauled UI treatment we recently added, but we didn’t have time to fully integrate all the new pages. The chapter select and character viewer were particularly intricate, so they were left a little unfinished. But with a month to focus on it we managed to apply that fresh coat of paint to those pages. There are also a number of other subtle UI tweaks, including a new textbox for CGs that should work better for mobile users.

HeartGear once again graced us with a new slate of sketched backgrounds for scenes appearing early on in the game. We’re still focusing on sketched versions right now so that there’s fewer distracting MSPaint backgrounds (the ones we affectionately call Zeppo Backgrounds). Even so, they’re already adding a great deal of tone and polish to their scenes.

“But wait,” you might ask, “didn’t Felicia get a theme back in November’s update?” Yes, but now we have two variations on that theme for the character before and after the TF! In fact, you can hear the variations transition between each other in the café scene on Day 2 of the Felicia path. That’s right, we’re so into transformation here even our music TFs!

Even in a makeup month we have new story content for you to enjoy. If you read the sexy TF stories featuring a certain pig or a certain fox you might have been disappointed to read that the conclusions of their stories weren’t present in past versions. Now their concluding scenes have been added, including some sketched sprites for each character. We think there’s a lot of cute and funny scenes featuring the two, and we hope you enjoy them. Additionally, we finally finished converting the entirety of the story to present tense! It was a bit tedious, but this was the perfect month to finish the project. Going over some of the first content to be written also gave us a chance to bring the early writing up to snuff with the current quality of the game.

And as one final bonus, we’ve included a new secret easter egg in the writing. We won’t tell you what it is, but we’ll at least let you know it involves completing Felicia’s path. :3c

That’s all for this update! Our artist KDhynamo has settled into his new job and he and the rest of the team will be back next month to continue the story of Mice Tea! See you then!