Build 7: Pieces

Build 7: Pieces is here!

Alex stands at a crossroads. Tempted by a limitless power that could alter the fate of Illayla, he fights to control his emotions amidst nightmares of slaughter, pain and rage. He focuses on developing his relationship with Loken and his allies, seeking companionship and trust in this broken future. But in attempting to abandon his past and relieve the trauma, the darkness only swells. He's forced to either confront the painful memories of his past or drift down the path of bloodlust and fury.

Meanwhile, the consequences of Devil's Crag begin to reveal themselves, and Illayla may never be the same again.

This was a particularly difficult update to write! For those who don't follow me on twitter or discord, I was hit by a few health issues this year - first a serious infection on my wrist, then a bout of COVID that left me in pieces for a couple of weeks. I'm fine now luckily but finding the strength to write was tough, so I'm relieved to finally get this build out there!

There are four more builds to go after this until this story is finished, and I consider build 7 to be the 'calm before the storm' - the best is certainly yet to come! A big thanks goes to Elle and Sidmon for their amazing artwork, plus Sam for all the editing work. Also to my discord mod team for beta-testing, and a big thanks to Ortho on discord for doing an amazing proof-read and spotting loads of typos that I missed even after several read throughs!

So what's in this update?

• Day 9 has been added. It's roughly 27k words in total. Saves should carry over, but you can start from the beginning and use the day select option that appears to skip straight to the new day.
• 6 new CGs are included in this day by Elle and Sidmon.
• A cull of exclamation marks! I went through the whole script and removed a whole bunch, since when I first started writing I had an overly enthusiastic habit of using way too many! I'd say I removed about 500-600 of them... and, yes, it took hours.
• A preview of the one of the songs from the upcoming original soundtrack. At the very end of day 9, you'll hear a short section of Alex's theme. It was heavily based on the theme for the character that served as an inspiration for Alex's arc - see if you can figure out who it is!

CONTENT WARNING! DAY 9 CONTAINS NSFW!

You are given the option to skip all these scenes, and doing so will not cause you to miss important story beats - the 'skip' options have all the important stuff edited in. However, there is still a small amount of nudity present regardless of choices.

If you are live streaming, ensure you have NSFW content turned off in the main menu before the day starts, even if you are picking the non-sexual options! This way, regardless of what options you pick, you shouldn't have to censor anything as all CGs are either cropped or pre-censored.

What's next?

As I said, there are four more builds to go until this story ends. Of these, the most important will be the 10th and penultimate build. If you thought build 5 was horrifying, that was just a gentle warm-up!

Build 10 will also feature a big re-vamp of previous content. Improvements will be made to the previous days, the main menu will be re-vamped, some additional CGs may be added, choices will hopefully be expanded and the soundtrack will be released and implemented to the past days. 

And that's all!

As always, you can follow me on twitter to get updates and previews on the project. I also occasionally do dumb streams and am fairly active in the official discord server, so come and say hey!

And finally, a huge thanks to everyone to has donated on KoFi to help the project improve! It's thanks to you that we're able to include so many awesome new CGs, and we can throw loads of money to  our well-deserving artists! If you want to help support the development of Soulcreek (and perhaps future projects, hint hint), you can do so below! Any small amount makes a huge difference, and I can't stress enough how different these updates would be without it - I'd likely only be able to afford a single CG for each one, rather than six! I'll make sure everyone who helps out gets a credit in the final release!

Stay safe and be kind to each other!

-Ryuo