Sadie Gets a Life 0.2.7 Dev Log, 2026-02-12
Development work for 0.2.7 is pretty well complete at this point and I'm currently testing it. Like I've mentioned in prior dev logs, 0.2.7 officially ends Act II and also closes up the Eastern Duchy storyline, at least for now. The prior dev log talked about Arksvardt, and in this dev log, I'll talk a bit more about the main thrust of this release: diplomacy. Specifically, the behind-the-scenes name of Act II is Diplomacy in Action.
As you've played through Act II, you have made, on Sadie's behalf, a series of decisions. Some of these decisions have consequences, and this is where we see the culmination of some of those consequences. There are seven total factions that come into play during these negotiations:
Duke
Adventurers' Guild
Reform Church
Orthodox Church
Core Nobility
Merchant League
Law and Order
The more of these factions you have in your corner, the better the outcome will be. It's impossible to gain the support of all seven factions (without modifying a savefile and cheating, I suppose), but if you are diligent throughout Act II, you can get the best outcome. You can't actually fail in diplomacy altogether, as even the worst outcome still has some modicum of success. But how you do in this section will have impacts further down the line, and the worse you do here, the harder certain elements will be later on in the game.
But along the way, I couldn't help but sneak in one more big action sequence. This one is special in that I introduce, for the first time, splitting the party up into sub-groups and having them work independently of one another. At a minimum, you will have three characters in your party, and by this stage in the game, so those three required players (Sadie, Dinestra, and Mallory) will each take on their own actions. If you have Neemar and Karin in your party, they'll join Sadie and Dinestra, respectively. My goal in this is to have three varied action sequences, each of which plays to the character's strengths.
I think my favorite of the three is Mallory. Her sequence is an extended stealth sequence that includes sneaking through grates that run under the floorboards. I had in mind some of the sequences in the Arkham games (Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, to be specific), where you can use small tunnels to sneak around certain areas. The mechanism I put into place is a very, very poor representation, admittedly, but I hope it at least invokes that image for people.
As we go on, I'll definitely split out sub-parties more often, especially as we gain more and more characters. By the end of Act III, I have eight total characters that you can collect. I don't think the number will go up much from there, but I do want to make sure that each character has specific benefits that make them all viable, and hopefully you don't feel the urge to leave too many of them on the bench because they're not good enough.
As always, next week will be the release for Tier 3 patrons, and then the week after for everybody else. In the meantime, I'll wrap up testing on this and continue working on release 0.3.0, which will be huge, to the point that I might even need an additional dev log in between the normal weekly updates just to capture everything going on.