December finished the Tkinter-to-PySide 6 migration, stabilized AppState-driven panels and hub animations, added a terminal-style event bus on the hub page, and kept polishing user modes and config refresh overhead.

November migrated Tkinter to PySide 6 panel by panel and redid crystalline Nucleate splash animations in Blender—balancing GIF file size, NLA complexity, and premium pricing experiments around $30.

October restructured Echo into Nucleate—settling the name after Amazon conflicts, streamlining dependencies, refactoring the mode builder and Echo Labs, and cutting the Windows build to about 300 MB without Torch/MPS.

September expanded Echo to fifteen user modes and a 3,000-line config while fixing GUI bugs, Tkinter refactor pain, GIF animations, and packaging—with a marketing shift toward animations over waveforms.

August packaged Echo alpha V00 with a setup wizard, icon and menu redesign, special notes manager groundwork, and tray busy-state tracking—plus business account integration and Mac support strategy.

July expanded Echo user customization with multiple user-defined modes, tailored summarization behaviors, Notion integration, and GPU detection fallbacks—while chasing stability bugs and preparing for first product launch.

June laid technical and business groundwork for Echo—Watchlight Studio’s first local LLM scribing tool—stabilizing core functionality, refining branding, and advancing LLC and admin setup while pausing art production for the launch push.

May blended 3D terrain and overworld work into a predominantly 2D hand-drawn sprite workflow, using Blender procedural tools without losing the handcrafted look. Workflow infrastructure and business formalization also moved forward.

April advanced the local scribe project and Watchlight Studio’s infrastructure—transcription workflows, summarization and tagging experiments, a distinctive visual style for creative assets, and early business and monetization planning.