News From the Six Realms #84 - Heatwave (Patreon)

Alright, bit late this month due to being incredibly white and unable to deal with it being 30 degrees (fuck global warming) but here we go.

Before we get to the upcoming release, a few things to mention. First up, you may have noticed the art on Twitter for advertising purposes looks a bit blurry lately, this is because I am using Glaze to protect it from being mined. Twitter has decided to sneak something into the TOS about being able to use anything you post to train AI, and as someone who employs a number of artists, and believe they deserve to make a living, I think this is bullshit. I strongly believe in people over profits, and as long as I am making games, I will not be using technology that puts people out of work solely to benefit myself.

Moving on to the next thing - there may be an opportunity to make some merch. Our publisher has contacts on that side of things, and we would be able to adapt some of the products they already make into SoC-themed items (stickers, standees, dakimakuras, etc). However, there would be some costs associated with this (both on item design, and upfront payment) so I'm going to see how things go. Business isn't great at the moment (this is going to be the worst Patreon month of the year so far), so I don't want to make any extra investments until things improve. File under maybe something for the future.

Time to talk about the release - I've already got a decent chunk of work from Nyx who is taking over on Helanya. He has made rewrites to the old events to bring them into line with the new plans, and also submitted a few small new room events. Exagie is still working on the Rowan and Andras NPC arc, so there will be more content for that as well, while Hooky is still plugging away at the Fae arc, and Rein (hopefully with a little help from Winter) will be contributing to the ongoing goblin recruitment arc.

Art-wise, I have most of the art back from Sommy now, and I have been sharing it with the backers. I'll have the last few finished CGs over the next couple of days in time for the art pack as always. On the coding side, Rein and I are both working on implementing chaos incursion in the manner they were supposed to function, and Dragoon is busy bringing us up to date with Renpy 8, and using the updated code to modernize a few things on the backend. 

That's all for today. For those of you waiting on the poll, I'll get it up today at some point, and as always, barring some sort of disaster, the next release should be out on the last weekend of next month, which this time is the 30th of July.