I realized I'm kind of a hermit, and that's not so great if I plan on cultivating an audience and ameliorating concerns on whether the content they want from me will actually be created. So from now on, I'm going to try and make little devlogs every 1-2 months, just to prove I'm alive and thinking about what to do next. Hopefully that works out.

Anyway these past few months I've hit some writers' block on Ryka's route, so I decided to pivot to working on Lincoln's. Chapter 1 of Rusted Blade launches later this month, alongside with more sidequests for Iron Fist and Silver Shield! Main features: 

•  Main story continues (Rusted Blade chapter 1) 
•  more optional content for Nathaniel and Ryka (sidequests!) 

Future Plans: 

• improvements to The Gauntlet (more roguelike-esque elements, such as random events) 
• dungeon-crawling segments? (tentative) 

 I realized a few months ago I've kind of backed myself into a design space corner due to the structure of the game. See, the story is structured around 3 days for each of the PoV routes, and then there'll be an Endgame route that ties everything up. Therefore, all side content canonically must occur during these 3 days. This ruins the point of having a calendar system if you're thinking it'll be like Persona, as there is no gradual build up of daily mundanities before big events. There must ALWAYS be big events each day.

This is a problem for a turn-based RPG because it inherently limits the number of combat encounters, especially since fights are mostly paced around the gladiator tournament in-universe. The low number of fights also makes levelling up extremely slow, since there are fewer sources of EXP. One of the reasons I wanted to spruce up the Gauntlet during the last update was as a sort of compromise for people who wanted more combat in the meantime before I was able to solve these design issues. I'm myself someone who enjoys optional combat encounters (Disgaea fan), so I wanted to provide some of that sort of content for players like that. In a similar vein, I'd like to add a dungeon system to the game for the purpose of more combat. One of the new sidequests coming with Lincoln's route serves as a sort of prologue to that, so be on the lookout. Anyway those are my rambles for now. 

 Cheers!

 -Caspore