It's 2024!

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you'll have a great one :)

I certainly wish I were writing this to celebrate all that was achieved in 2023 and to look forward at the future chapters of EK coming up soon, but it seems the last one has been stuck in dev purgatory for the last 18 months (!)

So what the heck happened? Thankfully, nothing major (touch wood), but it's been a tough year, and I can't say that drawing, writing or programming has been at the forefront of my thoughts for most of it (as you can tell from my DeviantArt, blog or whatever else). However, development never stopped, even if it's slowed down to a crawl. I definitely let ambition take the wheel for a bit there, and I tried to fix stuff that wasn't broken, add things that probably didn't need to be there, and expand scope beyond what was realistic. Having so many things to work on at once can be daunting and sometimes it just paralysed me. I'd love to say lesson learned, but I still need to finish the chapter ;)

Nevertheless, there are currently over 110 finished drawings in my Chapter 3 folder, with another 15 that will join them soon (it's mostly adding a few colours and saving the various bits individually in the game files); the backgrounds are done, the dialogue was written long ago. I've been going through my list of known bugs to fix them (currently sitting at 317), and playtesting a whole lot. I think it's fun! I hope you'll think it too.

I still believe that once that chapter is out, all the following work will be a lot faster, as there will be a lot less redundancy in the coding, a quicker pipeline for the art itself, automatic systems, etc. I think nearly all the spanking scenes now have interactive elements (lowering panties and whatnot), and there is already more variety for replayability. The card game is implemented in the previous chapters and works well too. It's just taken a really long time to get there.

Anyway, enough ranting! I hope you'll have a great start to the year, and I'll keep you posted on what's happening in the Elven Kingdom!

Love,

-Kalidwen