I won't be making any guides for the game (beyond the walkthrough I made for how to get a love interest locked in, that is). Players can feel free to make those guides themselves for others if they want 🙏🏼
As for your question: yep, that's a step back from their relationship status. Don't think of it as pushing the issue, and it's not really about the dagger either. It's more so about the fact that X is clearly hiding something incredibly important, which includes severe political ramifications which has caused problems for the Crown on multiple occasions, as well as being emotionally unavailable and distant.
If the Crown just lets it go and makes no further effort to close that emotional gap and hold X accountable, as well as showing X that they want to know the real them and not just the performance they put on, then the relationship remains surface-level. However, it still falls within the acceptable threshold of romance points that keeps the relationship steady, so it's not a problem yet. Hope that gives you some understanding!
Oh, tysm, that's a great catch!! It's been like 5+ years since I wrote the start of the story so sometimes I forget the details of what I established prior, I'll make sure to adjust the scene with the horses to account for that 🙏🏼
I think maybe that could be doable for the first 4 chapters? But after that the coding would take more time since the story splits into separate romance routes, and diverges with plot variations later on too 🧐
It would have to be a QoL feature to look into after the game is finished, I'd say!
About Yekbûn specifically, she and the Crown will have opportunities to deepen their relationship later, but it wasn't really the time for that in this chapter considering how busy the Crown is atm. The Crown's question about their parents is not about the Crown actually doubting that, it's more of a veiled way of saying, "can you reassure me about this?" especially after they feel the weight of expectation on them more heavily than ever. There's social nuance there ;)
Politically/socially speaking, yes! D's would be the taboo romance. R and A also have positions at court but their romances would not be as scandalous since neither hold political power the way D does.
I've tested it in 3 different browsers on 2 devices. This is definitely an issue on your end, not with the game. Try playing the game in a different browser, turning VPN off, turning adblock off, etc. I've never heard of this issue before so I can't say what's causing it, unfortunately.
CH9 is basically the very start of where the game starts to evaluate your relationship, so you have many, many, many more opportunities to improve it in the upcoming chapters. It also does not affect the amount of scenes you get with a love interest, it only changes the content/tone of those scenes!
Depending on your choices and the variations you get, per playthrough the novel is roughly around ~270k words. In total (including all variations and the different romance routes) it's 585k words!
Oh, thanks for that!! I had a really long break between writing CH11 and CH12+ so that detail must have slipped my mind, I'll definitely correct it in the next update 🙏🏼
I really appreciate that!! It was definitely important to me to make each love interest feel distinct to give players a completely new experience whenever trying out a new romance route, so I'm glad that comes through well. Thanks so much for the kind words 💖🥰
Definitely no Alexander type figure in this one, luckily for the Crown. Arsur would topple like a house of cards in its current form 💀
And yes, there are definitely lots more nations and cultures around! The long and short of it is that I simply haven't thought of them yet haha. I have rough sketches in my mind for some of them--I'd really like to incorporate a nation inspired by Ancient China, for example--but we'll see how much of that I end up including!You'll also find out more about Ivia (ancient Anatolia equivalent during Greek colonization) and the Sacati tribes to the north (equivalent to Scythians), but that's all I got for now.
As for the other nations, you'll definitely find out more and meet some representatives from Thallos and Qathesh as well in the future 👀 The Crown also needs to deal with foreign diplomacy at some point after all!!
I hadn't really thought of it that way before!! From a writer's perspective I'm just cringing at the flaws that I can perceive in my own writing, but it hadn't occurred to me that it might actually be interesting for the reader to be able to see the growth in my writing style over time 🤔
Thanks so much!! Having to leave this project unfinished would be an absolute nightmare to me, the only way that would happen is if I got caught up in something horrible happening in my irl so, you know, knock on wood
Absolutely, I'm very aware of rewrites mid-work being kind of a death sentence to projects in most cases! To be specific, when "remastering" the first 4 chapters, most of what I'd do is editing punctuation, grammar, and dialogue lines here and there. Kind of like editing the chapters a second time.
But as you mentioned, I also considered that finishing the story is going to take me several years more to complete, and by that time my writing style will have likely evolved again. So, going back to re-edit the first chapters now might be premature. I'll consider the idea again once we're closer to the end of the story, we only just crossed the possible halfway point after all.
You mean the Crown's family name? No, it doesn't affect anything in the story! All the surnames are taken from historical Kurdish poets and scholars as a cultural reference, that's all. You can look them up or simply choose the one that matches best/sounds best with your Crown's first name 🙏🏼
Thanks so much for that, I really appreciate it!! The Crown's unfamiliarity with such things was definitely a fun device to use to introduce the readers to the world as well, so I'm glad you enjoyed that 💖💖
