News From the Six Realms #66 - The Late Late Edition (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

News is late this month, because I'm very busy, and as a result this is likely to be short, but before we get into that - a quick word from o̶n̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶ ̶e̶m̶p̶l̶o̶y̶e̶e̶s̶  Winter:

Hello, Winter here.

I'm checking in to introduce you to my current main focus. The Liurial rework. The point of this is to give you a glimpse at what I've planned, and how we're approaching reworking and finishing up the storylines for the sidecast in act 1.

I started with finding the material I liked about her. Most of it was originally my work, so there’s a lot. In particular, there’s something compelling about her general demeanor. She’s shy and submissive, but she has a clear idea of what she wants sexually.

She's also one of the first staff members who read as an absolute Rowan loyalist. To that end she's important to the experience of someone roleplaying Rowan as gathering his own power structure.

Those are the elements that are absolutely essential to preserve and enhance with any rework. But, there are problems.

She lacks plot hooks and conflicts. Her intro was short and self-contained, and most of her content since then has been one-off sex scenes. Good sex scenes, mind you, but not the stuff an engaging finale is made of. She needs to want something she doesn't already have.

It's especially bad because she is such a valuable potential window into the world of the elves, her story potential is going to waste. How does a lone waifish elf babe wind up all the way in castle Bloodmeen? That could be a hell of a story.

Another consequence of her shallow story is that she doesn't have a lot to engage with besides sex. If we want to make her feel like a vital part of Rowan's growth in power, people should enjoy her besides male doms, even if that is her core sexual content. Giving her engaging non-sexual conflicts is the key to that.

Two smaller issues we've heard a lot about in feedback concern Rowan's portrayal and her threesome with Alexia. The former because it doesn't feel like we’ve captured Rowan’s psychology regarding domming her. It's right and proper for him to dominate her, but for him it should be more of a learning process. The threesome scene, meanwhile, is hard to trigger and even harder to navigate the complex options for.

So that's the plan. We're taking what already works and making it work better. Most of the scenes with Liurial will be largely kept as is. It's all about going through what already exists and adding depth, choice, and conflict. All building up to a thrilling finale with drama, a chance for Rowan to do cool shit, and some raunchy Mdom sex.

Exciting stuff huh? Well I'm going to try to get as much of it done as I can for our upcoming September release.

Wow, I guess this won't be so short after all. That is what I get for saying I'll pass on the words of a man who loves the sound of his own voice I guess. 😏 Moving on, work for this month is going well as usual. The writers are working hard and have already produced some sexy content for the next release, and I have all the art back from Sommy, and the backers have already seen it all.

As most of you already know, the main focus for this release has been getting the mechanics rework implemented and test. The merge was a long and painful process, but ultimately it went quite well, with only a few hiccups. Myself, Dragoon, Sommy, and Rein have been slaving away to add the finishing features, and hunt down and fix any remaining bugs, and it looks like we are pretty much there now. I'm hoping to get the mechanics rework into the next steam release (with none of the next release's new content) in two weeks, but it is dependant on how things go (it is looking good though, so fingers crossed) with the Patreon release to follow at the end of the month with the new mechanics and the extra game content.

That's it for this month. Next month I'll be talking about the roadmap for completing Act I, but for now, hope you are all looking forward to the new mechanics.