Owner poll results

After applying the strenghts of all the votes, turns out that Antoinette snatched victory away from Kyo with a late rally! Well, to the winner goes the spoils, Catherine in this case.

So, how will this route work? Well, if you don't want any spoilers, get away from here now! You have been warned. Basically, Antoinette offers Catherine a few methods to pay her debt. Some of them are quite mundane and will hardly affect the story, even if you wander into the slave route. One of them, however, will send Catherine into a spiral of debauchery at the hands of some of the Empire's scummiest individuals. As a brothel madam, Antoinette has contacts all over the capital, and she knows exactly who is willing to pay a premium to get their grubby hands on the most promising mage to come out of the Traxiaria in decades. Of course, she'll also get a lick in, as she's not above lusting after our intrepid protagonist.

I also want to rework how you start the slave route. Rather than sleeping for an esoteric amount of time and then randomly getting enslaved when a date comes up, Catherine now makes more than enough money to pay her debt. What you will get in the first few chapters is a few options for Catherine to irresponsibly spend her money. Do that one too many times, and when the collectors come knocking, she will not have enough money and will default on her debt. This puts the power of entering the route into the player's hands and ties it better with the story.

Adding the reworked slave route will take quite some time, more than adding any other route, as I’ll have to make space for it in the early parts of the game. So, for now, I’ll leave getting into the slave route as it used to be. I will be starting a full comb of the game soon, as before we can release the game, I’ll have to spend a month or two going back and editing everything. I want to bring the early parts of the game in line with my development as a writer so the whole experience is smoother. Plus, the early game can really drag at times, and I need to fix that. For that purpose, I want to divide my time slightly and start working on it now, but I’ll talk about this more in a future post.