Sadie Gets a Life, 0.3.3 Dev Log, 2026-06-25
Things are moving pretty quickly now with 0.3.3. I've knocked out the majority of content and will have a release available for Tier 3 subscribers next week. There's still a lot yet to do, but I'm happy with the way it's all shaping up. This release is also going to introduce a new form of combat. All of the combat to this point has been first-person. And in fairness, most of the combat in the game will remain so. But we're introducing another combat element.
Tactical RPG Combat
One of my favorite RPGs ever was Shining Force for the Sega Genesis. I loved the hidden goodies in-game, the cabinets and bookcases that would give you little messages, and the bits of in-game humor. But I really loved the combat style: that tactical RPG style of moving one character each turn and defeating enemies with a combination of positioning, strategy, and cheese.
Why do I bring this up? Because release 0.3.3 introduces Colton's Training Academy. There will be a shtick to Colton's Training Academy that I'll keep under wraps until release, but after each scene, you'll have the opportunity to fight a tactical RPG battle with simulated Freistadt soldiers against rebels, monsters, and more.
This will serve as a teaser for later uses of the tactical RPG style. I do want to make it clear that first-person combat will remain the norm for the rest of the game. But I've been working on this a bit and, once I get it to a point where it's pretty okay, I'll be able to intersperse some tactical fights as well for a bit of spice.
Spoiler: Text Walls Upcoming
One of the reasons that this release has taken a week longer than I originally anticipated is that there are a large number of plot-heavy scenes. To give you an idea, the combined set of major scenes that take place inside the Bottom Rung Hotel is currently ~5300 lines of text and over 54,000 words. This release is going to have somewhere on the order of 35-40,000 words of new dialog, descriptions, narration, and asides. And so far, I've counted nearly 100,000 words in Freistadt Harmonia so far. By contrast, a good-sized novel is 120,000 words, so I have a lot of opportunity to tell a (hopefully) interesting story. Along the way, the goal is to take advantage of a slightly slower pace of action in order to get to know the people around Sadie better and make them feel more like real people with their unique opinions, concerns, and beliefs. And sometimes describing them naked.