Progress Update: Servitor's Deck (SFW)

Such a gentle euphemism. It sounds like somewhere one might choose to live. A respectable district for the working class.

It is none of those things.

It is a machine made to cut wild trees into subservient planks. Whose prisons will push you to the brink, but never further. Whose drugs and schools will give you health and knowledge, but warp what it is to be healthy and knowledgeable. Whose laws are enforced by machines as cold and inevitable as gravity. A system so perfect that resistance isn't just impossible; it is incomprehensible.

And in its center, towers the Eye. The walls see all, but cannot look; The Eye looks, but cannot see. Its gaze is scalding and paralyzing and nauseating and violating. When it stares into you, when you feel it illuminating and sickening your flesh, others may wonder why, but you will not. You quickly come to understand what draws its attention. It is commanding you not to make the wrong friends, to say the wrong words, to think the wrong thoughts. It is carving its walls into your mind, and, sooner or later, you will no longer wonder what lies beyond them.

It is not a home, for we cannot leave. It is not a prison, for we can no longer dream of the outside. It is a sepulcher, filled with the dead who are not allowed to die.

Thanks for your patience on this update. It's been... a bit of a wild ride.

I'm in the home stretch, and the station view should feel like a completely new game when I'm done. All but a few of the new structures are finished, all of the new events are written. I'm mostly on to the cleanup part of the process now.

An NSFW version of the screenshot will be in a Patron post, because Patreon doesn't allow them in public ones.

What's done:

• The new decks (except for the palace, which is sketched, but not finalized)

• A main storyline. This was the part that ended up causing most of the delay. The ministers and their machinations went way further than I expected, including to a fourth ending centering around another major character.

• All but a few of the new structures

• Rewritten rendering code to get rid of bad posing and structure boundary issues on the station

• A rewrite of the under-the-hood NPC AI. It's a LOT faster now, which it needs to be to support the higher number of people on your station. It's also more stable.

• Bugfixes for reports that I've gotten from the last patch

• Removed most of the text still left over from SM1 (it stuck out like a sore thumb now that there is an overarching plot)

What's left:

• Render the last images for the new events.

• Finalize the last few structures and the palace deck

• Construction animations for the new buildable sections

• Show people accurately in the station view

• A bunch of fiddly tweaking to stabilize everything

I'm expecting to be done by December, but we'll see.

As always, thank you so much for your support. I know this one has been an insanely long wait, but I think it's going to be worth it when it's out.