April 14 Update (Patreon)

I have a general TLS update, but first let's talk about the April Fools' that wasn't. Please look at the image above and imagine yourself chuckling when you checked the blog or Patreon and saw everything rebranded thus, along with an announcement that all harem members in TLS were being replaced by Orcents.

Nine years ago, close to the dawn of TLS, I actually did an April Fools' Day joke. I claimed I was remaking the beginning of the game: what I'd done was replace all Simon's dialogue in the prologue with utter stupidity, and replaced his faceset with this:

I thought then, and still think, that this is mildly amusing. However, there were some people who were confused, or angry, or seemed worried that the game was actually going in another direction. Since it seemed to spread more irritation than happiness, I shelved all my extremely silly plans for future April Fools' Day jokes.

Years later, I was planning to do another one, especially when Lamsey sent me the Orcent header of his own volition. But as I was getting deeper and deeper into the final battle work, and events came up like the audiobook, I decided that I couldn't afford a distraction. So you will just have to look at the header and imagine.

Now, how is TLS development going? Very well, subjectively! It's harder to measure objectively, because at this stage in an update cycle, I'm always working nonlinearly. This time I'm even more nonlinear than usual... people looking into the game files will have no idea how everything came out in the order it did.

Over the years I've found this to be most productive, but that does mean it's harder to gauge overall. I can, of course, try to create an estimate, but I generally don't, because it's depressing to put in a long day of enthusiastic work and realize that the completion percentage barely ticked up a little. The final battle is reasonably long by any standard, and it's very heavy on past detail, callbacks, and other work-intensive stuff. There's just a lot of work to do.

What else happened this week? I did take the time to put up another $10 art post (oh good, Patreon decided to make links almost invisible) this week, but haven't even integrated those scenes yet. Here is a preview for everyone to enjoy:

Geez, that turned out to be giant. Well, I'm not changing it.

Anyway, TLS 0.74.0 is further along than it was before, and I continue to blaze forward with this as the overwhelming majority of my focus. Hopefully more good news next week!