Soulspire Dev Update #22

Hello everyone! Happy Monday, I hope you all enjoyed version 6. :) This will be a longer dev update, but I'll include a tldr at the end.

Overall Soulspire Update

I'm sure some of you are wondering what the bigger picture plan is for Soulspire, especially how many more releases are in the works. I've always intended Soulspire to be a shorter game, and based on the speed at which I've been making content, I should be done by the end of January 2027 (barring any disruptions). That means we're already more than halfway done with the game, which is kinda wild to think about! I have plans for a game 3 after Soulspire (a big VN similar in scope/scale to PoP), but I'm not going to begin work on that game until everything is done with Soulspire. :) Speaking of working on Soulspire...

Version 7 Update

I'm already at work on version 7, and I have a different plan than usual for this release. Instead of releasing version 7 in August and version 8 in September, I'm going to release one large update in September that has all the content for those two months. There won't be any less content, it's just going to be released all at once. There are two big reasons I'm changing it up - story pacing and animations.

The story content planned for August and September are very tightly connected, to the point that it's a little difficult to cut the content off neatly between those months. Instead of forcing a split in content that doesn't make a ton of sense, I think it's better to just keep that big chunk together.

Animations are the other reason it makes to sense to combine the releases. Both August and September's content are planned to have animations, which are pretty time consuming to make. Add in all the physics effects, and it just takes a lot of time to dial everything in properly. By doing all the content for these months together, I'm gonna be able to get a bit of an "economy of scale" effect going, which will let me get more animations done.

Soulspire Steam Update

This week, I'm also working on getting the Steam store page set up for Soulspire. My goal is to have it done by the middle of the month so people can start wishlisting. Once it's up, I'll post about it here. :) My current plan is to do the same Steam key system I did for PoP - if you pay the game's cost on Patreon, I'll give you a key. More details about the cost and all that when I know, because I still haven't done the setup. :P

TLDR: Soulspire should be done in January 2027. Version 7 will be a double-length release that comes out end of September. Soulspire Steam page is coming.