Jan 2023: A Bump in the Road

Hey folks, Whale here,

As you can tell we're slightly behind on Build 3: Beltane Fires. The usual combination of holidays, real life, and work drama has conspired to push back our release date. We now intend to release Build 3 in early February. So it goes.

Follow-on Work from Build 2: The Hanging Gardens

Regarding the magic system: Dan and I went through and reviewed the script so far, and made some edits here and there to better explain the magic system, while at the same time not getting bogged down in exposition. Hopefully that makes it more approachable to new readers.

The new Memories menu (which allows players to skip to any chapter) is a lot easier to use -- it made playtesting Build 3 a breeze.

I reviewed a couple different glossary ren'py plug-ins for our intended in-game lore guide, but haven't found one I particularly liked. I will probably end up rolling my own in the near future

Build 3: Beltane Fires

The script was finalized and edited in early January, and is about 80% implemented. We're down to the following scenes:

• Tim's romance scene during Beltane.
• Marcus' romance scene during Beltane.
• [REDACTED]'s kinda-sorta romance scene during Beltane.
• Some background edits for one of the post-Beltane options.
• Some last-minute modifications to the final scene with Noire (see last devlog).

In the interim we got two new tracks from our resident musician/composer, Crimson: A character theme for Abigail and a new "tension" theme to replace the slightly cringe royalty-free track we were previously using (and which people might remember from Strokkur). Both of these have been woven into previous builds as well.

Build 4: The Nickel-Plated Tower

I'm in the process of finishing the draft for Build 4; we're something like twenty pages in and less than a quarter of the way through the plot. (For comparison, Beltane Fires came in at seventy pages or around 16k words.) There's one new major character sprite still in the works.

Thanks everyone for your patience and continued support. I'm pleased to see new readers trickle in, and greatly enjoy reading everyone's reviews and comments.

As a reminder, you can ask us your questions on the itch.io forum below, on our Twitter @AnamnesisVN, or at our retrospring: retrospring.net/@anamnesisvn.

Thanks for reading!