Mancer Update: Alexis

Hey everyone, long time no update because we were discussing and rearranging a bunch of ideas regarding our next visual novel!

After some deliberation, we decided to take some of our newer cast and put them on the backburner for now - the main reason was that we still weren't as familiar with these characters to write really interesting chemistry between them, and to get more familiar with them would postpone the game's release by even longer.

For that reason, we've changed our minds regarding some of our early goals for this project and had to rewrite a lot of it as a result. A summary:

• Inbetween the last update and now, we changed game engines from Godot to Tyranobuilder (an engine specifically made for visual novels, similar to Renpy) which took time to adjust but overall made writing the game a lot smoother.

• As opposed to fully SFW, the game will return to being NSFW, though sort of in an inbetween? Think of it like how Baldur's Gate 3, Witcher or Cyberpunk 2077 has explicit sexual content and nudity, but people still consider them "legit" games because of the story and gameplay?

  Well this is just a visual novel so there's not much gameplay, but we did still want to reach our goal of making our next game more accessible and streamable to more players, so we'll return to having sexual content back in the game, but in a way that's easier for streamers to avoid (like deliberate dialogue options) - so far we haven't drawn any in this game because a lot of the art has been focused on scenes and new portraits, but they're expected to return in scenes where you max out your affection with certain characters.

• We'll be reintroducing some familiar characters into the game, starting with Alexis and May! We're treating this as a "soft reboot" of the Project WAND timeline -- our first Project WAND game went full yuri harem but not quite "cool magic school", so we want to take a second shot at it again with even cooler lore. There was also lore about dragons and demons hinted at in Land of Leng that we couldn't really explore (ending up as a fairly straightforward bad-guy invasion plot) that we'd love to dive deeper into for this next game.

• All-new portraits for all characters.

• The game will be written in first person from Alexis' point of view. We found this allowed the dialogue to be more immersive and descriptive, so let us know how well it works once it's out!

• A lot of art in the game will follow a "manga panel" style for certain scenes. This let us draw a lot of scenes and get more mileage out of every scene which would have been much more bare if it was with fewer full-colour illustrations - though of course those will still be part of the game, just during more important parts.

Itch Release

The first "chapter" of the game will be releasing on our itch store soon as early access! This will let you all read and support the game early. Once more of the game is complete we will release it on Steam too.

No confirmed release date yet but should be relatively soon, but we wanted to post an update summarising everything so far so you'll be prepared for the release. Thanks for your continued support!