May Progress Update

Hey guys, time for some updates about the game's current state and what we're looking at for the immediate future. It's almost all good news, but there are some actual developments and changes to talk about.

TL;DR: OrcQuest is done, we're doing a bunch of stuff for Mayternity, and there's three other dungeons in various stages of production along with level 4 unlocks. That'll pack the next few months with goodies for you :)

Narrative Changes/Updates

So first up: OrcQuest is finished! 53,000 words of hard viking fuckin' ready to rock. It's going into edit/cleanup now, then to code soon after. Note that Arona's actual companion stuff and repeat interactions with the dungeon denizens (if you retain access to it) won't be in at initial release; that's a whole other big project for a bit down the road.

The next three big chonks of content are going to be the Marefolk Village (a friendly settlement in South Harvest) which is currently in the writing stage; a big spoopy dungeon in the High Mountains featuring Garret as a potential tagalong, which is currently ready for implementation; and finally, the Hornet Hive, which is going to be my next big writing project. Hornet Hive will also be the first source of player-character bimbofication, and will probably be the last thing to do before we open up the next explorable area (the Frostwood) in a few months.

With all that content in various stages of production, I *do* have to mention something being cut from our outline for the game. It was never in production, and after a lot of thought, we decided to shelve the idea. Specifically, if you follow the forum or Discord, you've probably heard us talking about a story arc where you can choose between Keros and Taoth (Urta's ball-baby from CoC1) as the God of Trickery.

Considering the sheer mass of Kiyoko's content, and that her relationship effectively locks you out of Taoth's route, we've decided to cut Taoth's alliance path rather than try to play catchup (and, inevitably, fail) against several novels' worth of slutwife content. This is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that Taoth may or may not even exist in your Champion's world to begin with, making it side content off of side content. As such, Taoth's role in the game is being downsized to purely an antagonistic one. He'll feature in sidequests later in Kiyoko's plotline, though we're not quite sure what form exactly that will take yet.

Mechanical Changes

Level 4 will be unlocked soon, supporting South Harvest, OrcQuest, and WolfQuest as well as the Frostwood. 

We've already had a significant under-the-hood update to combat code to facilitate upcoming content. I'm going to sit down with Drake around when we implement Level 4 and also do balance tweaks and flavor text reworks on existing powers and status effects. Get everything where we want it to be for the next leg of game development.

None of the changes will likely be *too* noticeable to y'all but my hope is that they'll make encounter balance and design smoother on our end.

Mayternity

Hey, next month is may, which apparently has some "mayternity" thing going on? I don't know much other than Tobs and Drake are very excited about adding a bunch of pregnancy/motherly stuff to the game in May, so I guess we're doing that!

In no particular order, here's some things that we have planned for May release. Can't guarantee all of it will get in during May (a lot of it still needs writing), but if not, it'll be trailing shortly into June.

New Kiyoko content for high kit-counts; Shar, a preggable harpy NPC I've been wanting to write since like 2012; Lupine pregnancy and Garret becoming a daddy off you; implementing Heat/Rut cycles for the player character where appropriate; Ovilixir, a potion you can take to get eggnant or speed up an extant pregnancy of any kind; better egg drop rates from harpies; and other misc. pregnancy/fertility items TBD.

Also, you'll be able to buy birth control from Ivris if none of this is your jam. Both male and female versions are written already, to be added soon. 

Thanks for your support as always!