Weekly Progress Update [07/AUG] (Patreon)

Hey all, hope your week went well 💖

It's been a while since a proper progress update but I've had a lot of things cooking in the meantime that I'm excited to update you on!

In case you haven't seen in yet, I announced the release dates for Chapter 9 on my Tumblr a few days ago - it differs per tier, so make sure you check when your tier gets the release! 

It'll be released similarly to how I release the character snippet on Patreon: it'll be put on itch.io on a separate protected page, and I'll post the link here for each tier on the chosen date. Make sure to check in!!

Chapter progress & new mechanic

I'm almost finished drafting the middle section which consists of the court scene, and have started working on the individual LI romance scenes. As for the beginning section, I've polished off the 2 main branches (they're 16k words each with 5k words of overlap, meaning just the beginning portion of the chapter is already 32k words in total!). As for the court scene, I'm 6k words in, so the total wordcount for the chapter as of now is 38k words.

I think I've mentioned this before, but the new mechanic this chapter introduces are relationship checks with the love interests. It's a bit of a hidden mechanic (as in, the game does not explicitly tell you that it's there) but you'll be able to notice it if you pay attention to the way your LI and your Crown interact with each other without your input.

There are varying scenes during the start/middle of the chapter that will change whether your relationship with your LI is high or low. At the end of the chapter, you will get a romance choice, and this will be your main opportunity to try to "course-correct" your low relationship, or bolster your high relationship.

In terms of what this means for the story overall: a high relationship with your LI will unlock extra scenes, while a low relationship will lead to distance or conflict. Getting a low outcome for a relationship check once or twice doesn't mean you've already failed the game as you can always catch up by choosing the right romance options, but. 

The game will track how often you've gotten a 'low' outcome during a relationship check. The more low outcomes you have at the end of the game, the worse your relationship with the LI will end up being. 

So, a person with a consistently low outcome throughout the story will get an even worse LI ending than someone who had high outcomes as well, but just happened to fumble the ball at the end. Similarly, a person with a consistently low outcome who managed to save the relationship at the end will also get a variation in their ending!

I added this because I think it gives more complexity to the relationship than just Get The Minimum Amount of Points Required. Whether you've done consistently well, or you struggled throughout, I thought the game should acknowledge it. After all, if your Crown has had conflicts with the LI in the past but the game suddenly turns around and acts like they had a perfect romance all along... that would feel out of place lol.

So do your best!! Or don't, if you want to see the bad endings 🤪

Art progress

If you remember, I said ages ago in another progress report that I commissioned Gabby (@artbygaia on Tumblr) more character art, this time for the Crescent Blades, namely Tûjo, Heval and Şanazî, and I got some initial sketches back!!

This was Gabby trying to figure out how to pose the three of them, and we realized the height difference between Heval and Şanazî was too big lol. She's going to make Şanazî a bit taller (courtesy of imaginary heels) to fit her better into the frame.

A separate sketch of Tûjo! We figured out the poses by now so Gabby will be drawing them each separately and then putting them into the frame together. 

I'm super excited to see what the final product is going to end up looking like, and I'll keep you updated with further WIP shots as I receive them.

That was it for this week! As always, thanks so much for all your patience and support 💖