release date

hey guys - big post, but if you just want the important parts: release date for 7-day-early patrons will be 25th July, with the rest following and public release on the 1st. Attached is a loose roadmap of immediate plans, with further info in the post.

RELEASE:

So, we've got all of the stuff compiled and playable - we're playtesting at the moment, but it looks like everything is good in terms of coding and no errors that we've come across. However, on release if any errors do pop up for players, Nds will be available to resolve it (hence the friday release).

At the moment we're just going through and making sure everything flows well and reads nicely, making edits and adjustments as needed with dialogue/prose/sprite placement and all that sort of stuff.

As mentioned many times now, we've gone ahead and reused assets to make sure we get this out as soon as we can. We'll be replacing assets as we continue to work on it, so that eventually all of the stuff will be in one cohesive art style.

This short intro patch is about 20k words, and mostly just sets up Avarton, some of the characters and some of the locations. There's also a few choice points that will impact you in later quests and events. As we said at the start, we still want this project to be a choices-matter project, just like KoD was.

GOING FORWARD:

Attached is a small roadmap of our immediate plans, and what we're going to be working on as a team.

To go into more detail with it:

Immediate - we'll be playtesting and finishing up any loose coding that we need to do for anything that might pop up, and we're also doing an additional sprite as one of the characters has a decent amount of potential screen time.

0.1 Release - after we release it, Nds will be keeping an eye on any bug reports, while Joy and Monsinne start working on the variant scene, as well as finishing detailed outlines for the next patch for the relevant quests.

Post 0.1 Release - following the public release, we'll be working on two things: both 0.2 (with Joy, Nds and Monsinne), and Nds and Monsinne will be working concurrently to finish the last filler patch for the filler questline on KoD. Included in the work for 0.2 is not only the scenes we'll be doing (at least 2), but several sprites for new characters, and old characters; the current list for sprites is: Jasmine, Cade, two of the brothel girls, a new character for one of the quests, and potentially the shopkeeper (the apothecary from KoD), and another new character.

We will during that process put up the patreon pick + variant vote.

We expect patch 0.2 to be a lot bigger than the intro patch; we're anticipating about 40-50k words with at least 2 scenes.

TBD - at some point in the near future after that, we'd like to revise the patreon tiers and rewards, as well as looking at cleaning up the UI elements in a better style than the default.

BEHIND THE SCENES:

Before bringing LewdJoy onto the team, I (Monsinne) had briefly discussed it with him, and gone over some of the stuff. I had a loose idea of the characters, plotlines and overall plot I wanted to do.

However, due to the issues we had, I wasn't sure if we were going to be able to bring him on and do this project, so we did not go too indepth. When it became clear that this was the path forward, we basically brought him on and started working straight away.

If I remember right, the announcement post of him joining was 2 days after we brought him on. That means that familiarizing himself with the characters, us developing them, brainstorming in more detail the plot, characters, and quests; discussing with Nds the framing and all that, we had to do all of that and the writing and art for the intro patch, and we did it in about 2~ months (a couple of weeks was Nds coding). I'm very happy with that.

The last few KoD patches were very large - sometimes upwards of 80k words. I prefer doing bigger stuff with a lot more small interactions and events, small pieces of dialogue that you can get depending on variables. However, I felt it was more important to get the project going, be communicative with everyone here and show the work in progress, and to release something since admittedly it's been a while since our last release.

With the intro patch done, and the framework for Avarton coded in, patches going forward will be bigger with multiple quests, and more assets updated and replaced each time. We will be continuing to be much more communicative about our process and progress with this project, like we have since the announcement.


LOGISTICS:

Since we brought Joy on and started so quickly, I (Monsinne) definitely forgot to mention some logistic stuff and some of our processes/rewards. As a result, we don't have some of the hi-res for this first intro pack - we'll make sure this doesn't happen again. And I definitely forgot to mention how the sketch pack works. Instead of some sketches for this intro cycle, we'll have a completed piece that we did as a collab that we organized before bringing Joy on to this project. It has an accompanying story. We'll release that as a 'bonus' for the sketch pack tier reward, and going forward we'll be on top of this.

PERSONAL NOTE:

It's been a bit of an uncomfortable time for me (Monsinne), this was originally not my project, and while Nomo was indisposed, I did my best to continue as I could. It made it hard to effectively offer communication and progress updates.

Now it seems the position I have is one where I can do those things, and the team is in a good spot to continue working steadily. I'm excited to see where we go from here.

To everyone who has continued their sub support through this period, I can't really thank you enough. I hope you will all like the work we've done on this new side project.

To everyone else who has had to let their sub lapse, I completely understand, and if you're still here and reading and interacting, I still can't really thank you enough. I hope that with our efforts at being more transparent and communicative along with our new work, you might consider supporting us once again.

Thanks, everyone.