BIG NEWS about Tales of Rein Ravine Steam release!! (Patreon)

How are you doing?

Time to answer many of the long-awaited questions about the Tales of Rein Ravine game release! You don't wanna miss this!

Because there seems to still be confusion among some followers about what exactly is a demo and what is a main game, let's briefly go through the basics.

Demo - short for demonstration - is a small showcase for a game idea that is early in the making, and that the potentially interested players can "taste-test". The Rein Ravine Demo was released here on Patreon in 2022 and is still downloadable to this day. The demo is essentially a small product of its own and it is different from the official game.

Official game, main game, full game - whatever you want to call it, is the 'real' game being developed. In our case, the official game Tales of Rein Ravine will be released on a platform called Steam.

Beta version or early access are unfinished, often buggy releases of the full game that will eventually get updated to be the full finished game.

The Rein Ravine Demo will stay on Patreon and won't be put on Steam. The official game Tales of Rein Ravine on the other hand will only be on Steam. You will not be able to download it from Patreon.

When will the Steam release come out? Why was it not released in 2023?

Originally the plan was to have the first release on Steam by the end of 2023 - well, as you know by now we are certainly late from this schedule.

One of the main reasons for the lateness is the dressage feature. When the development of the dressage gameplay started it wasn't known how extensive it could be made - perhaps it was only going to be following some paths in different gaits, utilizing the same checkpoint system from the demo. But after testing things out it started looking like a more advanced system entirely for dressage could be achieved. The newly built dressage system is capable of monitoring the rider's performance multiple times a second in five aspects - path following accuracy, gait, gait length, horse roundness and special movements (flying change, leg yield, etc). It calculates an average score for each of these separately from 0-10, and averages them into one score. The weight of the factors can be controlled, for example on lower levels roundness is not taken into account as much. The riding teacher can also react differently to your riding based on these factors. What has not yet been implemented, but would be very much possible too, is receiving a dressage sheet filled with your scores after a dressage competition.

Another incident that caused some delay was that I was in a small accident last summer. It was nothing serious and only affected my lower body, but mentally I was not doing very well at that time for since I couldn't go outside or do anything. So in July-August things moved very slowly. (Everything has healed perfectly now so no worries❣️)

On top of these, in general just some things taking longer than expected. Cross country feature required the whole horse character to be re-programmed from scratch, because the old one could not support uphill jumping. (I think I wrote a post about this a few months ago). Then very late last year my computer started blue screening and SSD failing (though at that point the schedule was already late anyways). In January I had to get an entirely new computer. This computer hassle was partially why there weren't any posts here early this year.

😭 These were vibes in January:

The new planned date of the first Steam release is 19th of July.

If the first part of the story is not yet ready to come out by then, in that case I will put out an early access version that let's you test out the new dressage stuff at the very least.

How much will the game cost?

Tales of Rein Ravine will be released as a Free To Play game on Steam, at least for now. It is possible that the later parts of the game will become paid. One thing is for sure is that the whole Early Access period will be entirely free.

What age recommendation will it have?

The player age recommendation is set by Steam after I complete a survey about the contents of the game. Currently when I test the survey it gives an age recommendation between 14 and 16 depending on the country. I feel like this is a bit of an overkill though. There were questions in the survey that I answered yes to that were more so in the grey area with Tales of Rein Ravine. So I will probably have to consult someone on this. But yeah, right now it looks like 14-16.

What is the story like?

The story starts by you moving to Rein Ravine, a mountainous equestrian business filled area in Central Europe, to begin your studies in the world famous Rein Ravine Equine University International.

Whereas I won't give you too many spoilers about the storyline yet, what I will reveal is that the story will be released in Episodes. So you will have, Episode 1, Episode 2, etc. Earlier I talked about the first releases guaranteed being free - this for example means that Episode 1 will be free, but all episodes might not be.

Let me know in the comments if there's other questions you'd want answers to!

— Maia, Tales of Rein Ravine developer 🖤