Saturday Devlog (May 22)

Hello and happy Saturday! As always, I hope you're all staying safe and healthy.

First of all, I'd like to extend my biggest gratitude for helping me reach my final goal! I was in tears when I first saw, y'all. It's incredibly validating that my work would resonate so much with so many people, and more than ever my confidence has been reaffirmed that there's a future for me in writing. I'll do my damnedest to make good on the grace that you've given me.

As promised on the $1k goal, I will be introducing significant expansions to the project! Most importantly, this includes the addition of two additional arcs onto the current storyboard--one before the resurrection, and one in a section that is yet to be written. Likely of particular interest is the pre-resurrection arc, which will be positioned after the White Fangs adventures and prior to Sister's  invasion. The arc will serve as the answer to two critical pieces of feedback I've received on the game repeatedly:

1. That the Arcadians felt like an unsympathetic side at the outset, because their oppression was told rather than shown. This new arc will see the mage travel to former Arcadian lands and witness firsthand the suffering wrought upon them by Parami occupation, and introduce a first brush with Tahlia's faction before you properly meet them after the resurrection. Hopefully this can balance out the two sides' narrative a little!

2. That a lot of White Fangs interactions are mutually exclusive to one another, such that attachment often feels exclusive to one of the three members. In response, this new arc will include at least one scene in which the focus is on the whole group, rather than any one individual member.

I'm excited to get to work on this arc, which will comprise the bulk of the next update. However, the new arcs do leave me in the awkward position of having a Book I that is significantly longer than Book II. I'm exploring ways for me to expand Book II as well, but all that's coming to mind is fluff that would slow the pacing rather than introduce new, meaningful content, and that's really the last thing I want for this story.

So, what to do? It is likely that I will instead be splitting Book I into two books of roughly 150k words each, with the first book ending where Part I ended. This would effectively make AMR a trilogy! I'm not certain yet that I'll be moving forward with the idea, but unless I can figure out a way to properly expand Book II this does look to be the most likely outcome right now!

Time enough to think about that in the coming weeks, though. For now, development of the next update is coming along steadily, and I've been able to chip in another 5k words over this week, placing the update at 15k words at the time of this writing. Furthermore, now that my finals are over, I've been able to clear out three entire days for nothing but writing towards the end of this month! To make full use of this, the update will be released on May 30th.

That being said, though it's very likely that I'll be able to meet the wordcount goal, the story won't be advancing too significantly with Update 4.0. This is because both the Arcadia day-off scene and the Eli reunion scene are shaping up to be far longer than I had initially projected! Needless to say, there will still be plenty of content to wade through, so I hope the update will be worth the wait all the same. :D

I've also begun making a bunch of progress on the side story! I'm hopeful that I'll be able to post it by the end of May, though of course the update will take priority for now. Art is also progressing smoothly--of particular interest is the cover, which is nearly done now and looking absolutely fantastic! I can't wait to show it off.

As always, I'm open to any and all questions you might have. Thank you for following the development of A Mage Reborn!