News from the Six Realms #103 - Acting Up

Hey all,

First up, the road to 1.0. We're working to get it out, and it won’t be long now. The main holdup has been the list of variables to transfer to Act II, and I needed Rein’s input; he's been busy with real life, but he is free now and working on it. Once he’s finished, Jr. X will add the backend code, while I add the latest finished CGs, and then we will put the release out. 

As I mentioned before, we are calling this version 1.0 because you can finish the game and transfer your playthrough to Act II. It is not feature complete. There will be additional releases over the next few months to add the following:

- The missing goblin arc weddings (Che-Lin and Tue-San)
- The remaining Fae events (Arzyl and Whitescar)
- Additional Astarte content (Sabotage, missing goblin content)
- Additional Finale NPC visit content
- Missing CGs

We will continue to release updates on Act I alongside pre-production for Act II. Sommy has been working on it for months, creating concept art for all the characters, finishing a few backgrounds, and now working on sprites, having just finished the first one (and you’d never guess who it is). We’ll start sharing these when we are further along in the process, but today I want to talk about one of the major gameplay features in Act II: Hubs.

Hubs are places Rowan can visit where people gather, and the player can roam freely. The largest and most important of these hubs, as you can probably guess after the epilogue, is Rastedel. They look and function much like Bloodmeen in Act I, with some key differences: Firstly, there is no longer a week timer or random events, which means that all events that can occur with characters will occur when visiting them, allowing the player to choose what they want to see, rather than rely on RNG. These events will either be plot-related or sex related (or both) and incorporate repeat sex scenes as requested during the development of Act I. To address player feedback, the hub UI will prominently display when new events are available, what requirements are needed to see a scene, and when the event will become unavailable if the main story has a cutoff point. Most events will involve investment (which we'll discuss later), so not all events will be accessible, and we hope to use this to let hubs evolve in different ways based on choices over the course of the game.  

That’s all for today. I’ll be back with more detail about hubs in the future, as well as how you unlock new events when we are further along with the process, but next time I do one of these, I’ll talk about the big changes to map exploration we’ve made based on Act I feedback.