News From the Six Realms #60 - Belated Valentine's Update (Patreon)

Hello all,

Is it nearly the end of February already? Time flies when you are legally trapped inside I suppose (to quote one of my favourite frontmen, the great Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs / Twilight Singers fame, "this must be what jail is really like"). As always though, the work continues, so we have got a bunch of stuff to talk about today.

First up - the next release is on track for a March 28th release. It will contain the large Greyhide scene Hooky has been working on, which includes three separate sex scenes, as well as the continuation of the Shaya NPC arc that had to be pushed from the last release. In addition to the progress on the castle NPC content, Exagie will be adding more scenes to the Alexia breeding pits event chain that involves Sil, as well as more content for our gay/bi players as usual, and I suppose I had better write the next Andras scene before you all get mad at me again.

On the art side, the backers have seen all this month's sketches. I have all the finished lineart back, which is currently being polished off with colour and rendering, all of which will be shared between now and the end of the month. Sommy has also been working on something on the cinematic side of the CGs which will not be shared due to not wanting to spoil the plot.

Moving on, what I really wanted to talk about today is the mechanics overhaul. I know we have been working on it for a long time now, and a lot of you have been waiting for it, but I can tell you that we have been making very solid progress on it. Pretty much all of the work on the backend has been finished now, with just a few small tasks left for Dragoon to take care of. 

The larger bulk of work has been implementing the new code into the massive amount of existing content. To give you an idea of how large a task this is, all corruption and guilt gains/losses, need to be re-coded, all infamy ones completely removed, and every skill check, wound, and inventory-related contented has had to be changed or removed. 

Rein has been very helpful in rewriting this stuff in the event docs, but I have had to implement all of it by myself. The good news is - I am getting there now. All the resource events have been re-coded, and by the end of this week, all the exploration events will be too.  

In terms of what is left:

- Story events ( Raeve Keep / Orciad / Rastedel)
- Ruler / Room events
- Merging with the latest release and applying retroactively to new events since the last merge
- Testing

It isn't really possible to give a solid date for the integration of the new system at the moment, as there are a lot of moving parts involved, and we all have obligations when it comes to keeping releases on time, but the current goal is to get a backer release out for mass testing if not by May's release, the July one at the latest.

That's all for today. I'll be posting the CG poll for the backers in a little while, and we'll be back with more news as always next month.  Until then, take care.