Hello all,

So another month and another release is out on time. Everyone seems quite happy with it, so that is good. As always work is well on the way for the next build in March, but I will talk more about that next month. Today I want to talk about what I touched upon in the last news post - the road to act 2.

So, while pretty much all of us would like to start act 2 tomorrow, there is unfortunately still quite a lot that needs to be done before that can happen. We didn't make as much progress last year as I would have liked due to a number of issues, but we are working to rectify those going forward. What is left to be done can be broken down into three categories; main narrative, castle content, and mechanics/QoL. We'll take a quick look at each of these to give you some idea of our plans.

First up, the meatiest bit left on the bone, the main narrative. If you have played the recent builds, or follow the game development, you will know we are currently making progress in two of these. The first is the goblin recruitment arc, and we've been making pretty solid progress with this. Rein is currently working on the finale of one of the characters, and hopefully Winter will be returning to work soon to help him with the other two. The other main narrative currently being worked on is the Fae arc, which Hooky is working on, and while it is not as far along, he will be making it his priority going forward. In addition to these two, we are also planning to try and rework Rastedel somewhat. We have had feedback since it was introduced that it feels too dense, and that the player's choices don't feel meaningful enough, so depending on how much time we have, we will do what we can to improve those two areas. Finally, we need to add the first act's epilogue, which will be the climax of the game, and function as a bridge between acts 1 and 2.

Secondly, castle content, which in this instance means all the other events that we need to wrap up before moving on. The largest subset of these are the NPC arcs, and thankfully most of these are either finished or mostly done now. The only one that is quite far behind, Andras, is being exclusively worked on by Exagie, so it should catch up quite quickly, but with less amount of work needed we still have Jezera, Liurial, Helayna, X'zaratl, Nasim, and if we have time, a wrap-up event for Skordred. After these, we have the NTR arcs. Andras is very nearly done, I just have two more events that I will do this year if it kills me, and hopefully Winter will soon return to finishing Jezera. Finally we have the rest of the events that don't fall into the above two categories such as wrapping up job events, the fertility stuff, etc. which isn't a huge amount of work, but still needs to be done.

Lastly, we have mechanics/QoL work. Most of the mechanical changes Rein designed have been added now, there's just one more thing - battle readiness, and that is being held up by issues with implementing incursions. If we can't solve it soon, we will implement a workaround and move on. There's also a lot of busy work that has to be done by me (adding sprites, adding sfx / music, fixing typos, scene gallery, etc) which isn't difficult but quite time-consuming. I'm going to start hammering away at that stuff though while the writers do their thing.

So, the question I know you all want the answer to is, when will all this be done? Unfortunately, I cannot answer that because it depends on too many factors. I'd love to be able to tell you by end of year, but that isn't really possible. There is still a lot of writing that needs to be done, and I cannot simply hire more writers because it needs to be done by the people who are currently writing it. I am pretty confident in saying that it will be sometime in 2024, which quarter though, I cannot say. Trust me, no one wants out of this act more than those of us working on it, and we will continue to put out large releases every two months until it is done.

So, this turned out to be another long one. I probably forgot something, but if I did, trust me, it is being worked on, there was just a lot to cover here. As I said, I will talk about the next release in the March news post, which is scheduled as always for the last weekend of the month, which this time is the 26th.