3/29 Status Update

Today was supposed to be the At the Mountains of Friendship 1.3 update. As you may have noticed, this post isn't that. So what happened? This one is completely on me, I forgot to get the voice acting done. I was getting things all wrapped up, and realized I never even hired the voice actress. So that's going to be a two week delay at least. In my defense it's been a pretty busy month with a lot of moving parts and things to get done. Sorry about this.

Sales of Netoria Tactics Gold on Steam has started to slow down a bit, but it's already sold over 800 copies. I'm not dwelling on its performance though as I've already started work on the golden route update which I probably need to change the name of. How about... the badass Carwyn route? What it's really about is Carwyn kind of snapping and deciding to be bold and aggressive and take what he wants. He claims Gwen, he claims Vivian, he saves his homeland, everything turns out great for Carwyn. And badly for Owain, Emrys, and Mordrid.

Mostly what I've done so far is write some scenes and get the ball rolling on the new art. There's going to be seven sex scenes and it's own epilogue, which makes this route one of the most art heavy in the whole game. But when you're devoting a whole update's worth of budget to one route that's what happens. This is is also the first route with alternative levels which is going to make it take more time. So don't expect this update next month, these expansion content updates are more "whenever I get them done" than a regular thing.

What might be done before the badass Carwyn update actually is a Netoria Tactics 2 demo. I almost have enough to make a patreon preview build with a couple of levels. Art production is in full swing. Character art, character sprites, scene illustrations, all of it is underway.

Here we have the Prince and two of his class options. Like I've said before, classes are very important in this game. If you're playing on the Prince's POV, his early game class will be Rebel, and if you're not it will be Guardian. This has both story and gameplay implications. His skills will be very different in both forms and push you towards doing different things. Rebel is a skillset similar to Carwyn's from Netoria Tactics 1 where he wants to be far away from the FMC unable to protect her. And Guardian is the opposite, sticking close to her is the optimal play. So when you're playing as the POV of Friend of the Vizier, the incentives are inverted, making it hard to corrupt people and take them for yourself.

Classes change at major story points, there's no class change item like in the first game. The later classes are all determined by the routes you're on. So if Prince is still with FMC, or if the Vizier has claimed him for herself will result in Prince becoming different classes again with their own skillsets.

In Naked Ambition news, I've hired a second pixel art artist to try and get things done faster. At the rate the other one is going we'll have the update done sometime in 2026 or so. Of course my own writing isn't going particularly fast, but hopefully more art production will light a fire under my ass to get more done. I have no concrete estimations on when .9 is coming out, but it is getting done.

Before I talked about doing a kind of gamejam thing where I release a lot of demos before deciding on what the next side project will be. I already made one, but I'm not too sure about releasing it. The thing about these kind of demos is it lets me exercise ideas I have and get them down but actually fleshing them out to the point that it fully gets what I'm going for across to an audience is a lot more work. So I don't think I'm actually going to release it, at least not yet. That does defeat the point a bit, but I've got enough on my plate right now that getting pre-production for a side game going right now is pretty low on my priorities. It needs to happen at some point, but that point is at least a few months off.

That's all for this week. As always, thank you for your continued support.