News From the Six Realms #47 - 2020 is Upon Us

Hello seedlings,

Happy new year to you all, I hope you enjoyed the holiday season. I had a nice break, but now it is back to work, as Rastedel is on the horizon. December was a very good month for us, the best in a long time, but as you know I’m not one to rest on my laurels, so we’ll keep pushing on. Ten thousand is finally in our sights, and hopefully this release will be the one to push us over.

The January Release

Speaking of this release, I will start with it, as this post is likely to end up quite long, and I know this is what most of you care about. :) It is shaping up rather nicely now, I have a lot to code, and more to come, as everybody else works hard on their part. It will be even bigger than our last release, with more words, more CGs, and more sex scenes, making it our largest update ever. 

I already have quite a bit of writing from Winter and Hooky, who are continuing to work on Rastedel to make sure it gets finished. Hooky is also doing a bit of Greyhide content as well, which may also find its way into the update if time permits. Rein is also working on getting his part of the Rastedel arc done, and DM has done a few more map events like he did for the last release. 

On the art side, we already have all the work from last month, and both Sommy and MDN are already working on their CGs for this month. As usual we’ve got another 8 CGs from MDN coming (on top of the 8 from last month), and these will have limited variants this time because Sommy is very busy working on his own CGs (we’ll go back and add them later though, so don’t worry). I’m really excited about what Sommy is doing this month, I don’t want to spoil it, but it is epic in every sense of the word, and I’m sure it will turn out to be my favourite thing in the game. As always I will start sharing the roughs with the backers as soon as I get them from MDN, I won’t be posting Sommy’s work though, as not to spoil the story.

So, release date? You guys know how I feel about releasing on time, I’d like to give myself as much time as possible to get everything in, so the date for the next version will be the last possible day, which is the 31st (a Friday).  

2019 Retrospective

Moving on, I think I can happily say that 2019 was a good year for the game. We made a lot of progress, adding hundreds of thousands of words, around 100 CGs, and a ton of new sex scenes. The funding also increased, and between that, the social accounts, and itch.io, we have a lot more eyes on the game than ever before. The thing I’m most proud of - all our releases last year were on time, and we had a pretty solid run on the monthly schedule, before switching back to bi-monthly. We also did our yearly poll, which showed the vast majority of people (both backers and non-backers) were very happy with how the game is shaping up, which is always great to hear.

It has been a bit of a mixed year for me myself. I’ve had quite a hard time personally, but I’ve never allowed it to affect the game. The main result was that I had to spend all the free time I did have coding, when I would have liked to write more, especially with how well my “Powerless” event was received. It hasn’t impacted the game negatively, as Winter and co are doing a great job on the writing side, but one of my goals this year is to try and write a bit more. I’ve got a few ideas about scenes (including the “Powerless” followup people keep asking for), so hopefully you’ll be seeing and enjoying those in the near future.

Speaking of the future, our roadmap for the year is pretty simple - keep working on finishing act one. After we tie Rastedel up, we will be implementing the long-awaited mechanics update. Most of the core coding has been done now, it just needs events to be updated, and vigorous testing. All of the writers will be working on creating narrative arcs for each non-central castle NPCs, so you’ll be seeing events chains for Cla-Min, Greyhide, and co similar to what Rein has done for Cliohna. Finally, we’ll also be adding another race recruitment chain similar to the Orciad, this time for the goblins. Later in the year, we will also begin pre-production for the second act.

So, overall as I said at the beginning, a good year for the game. I have always thought we have something special here, and I think the hard work we’ve been putting in over the years is starting to pay off. The game is getting better all the time, and it is also starting to become a bit more successful as well, which always helps. Hopefully, 2020 will be an even better one. 

Steam

Finally, a bit of surprise news - After a bit of wrangling with Valve to ensure it met their terms and conditions, Seeds of Chaos has been approved for sale as an early access title on Steam. I’ll talk more about this later in the month when the store page goes live (so you can all wishlist it, wink wink nudge nudge), but for now here is the important stuff:

• It will cover act one, with later acts being released as sequels.
• It will cost $19.99.
• It will always be behind the Patreon version, with updates having larger time gaps than the Patreon.
• Valve had no problem with any of the game content, so nothing has been removed or censored.

That’s all for today, this was a very long post and I really need to get back to coding, but I’d just like to say thank you to everyone, those who back the game, and those who support in other ways. We really could not do it without you. Here's to many more years of Seeds of Chaos. :)