Happy Winter Solstice, and Merry Whatever Non-Avalon Holidays You May Be Celebrating This Time of Year!

I have a couple grinchy updates before we get to the presents.

1. Survey Deadline Approaching!  

This is for Kickstarter backers, so I've removed it in other posts.

2. Release Date Pushback

I've been evaluating our progress at the end of the year, and at the team's current pace, we won't be able to release at our initial goal of August 2022. I am officially adjusting our anticipated release to Q4 2022 instead.

I'm very sorry we won't be able to hit our initial goal, but as you all know, it's been a very challenging couple of years for most of the planet.  On my part - you know that town in British Columbia that hit the international news for severe flooding?  Yeah, that was my town. We've had the entire natural world drop on our heads in various incarnations (deadly heatwave, wildfire smoke quarantine, catastrophic flooding) over the last six months. And while my family has escaped the worst consequences, it's affected my spouse's work schedule and I've had to take on a much larger share of household tasks. This is only fair, because his steady job is what allows me to take a chance on starting my own business and making awesome games for all of you!

My spouse's usual work commute as of mid-November. Yeah, it was bad.

We're still making steady progress, and anticipate the beta for Robin's route to happen in late January or early February at the latest.

Now, for the goodies!

Sherwood Sprite-o-Rama

Our Sherwood love interests (minus DLC LI Layton, who is still in the sprite factory) are complete! Here's the gang!

(Bonus!  A nice look at Marion's Sherwood sprite.)

A very nice glow-up for all of them, methinks. Robin and Will have two major poses now... Will has his crossed arms pose, but also the less petulant pose you see above. Robin has his hands-on-hips pose and also a more conversational one. John just has his main pose, but he has a really cool new outfit that you'll see in the endgame. And of course there are the combat poses. I'm particularly fond of Will's.

This may be the last thing a ne'er-do-well in Nottingham's back allies sees. Yes, Will has a less ostentatious outfit for skullduggery purposes.

Home, Sweet Home

We also now have variations of the Sherwood Cabin for all our love interests. You can get a glimpse of their personalities and interests if you take a good look.

Development Miscellany:

My main development tasks right now are writing Robin's route and re-coding the Sherwood common route with the new sprites. Our code assistant/consultant Shawna has been very generous with their time and helped me set up a very nice sprite coding system so that it won't be too terribly time-consuming to work with all the amazing expressions and poses that our new sprites have to offer.

I've also recorded the voiceover for our animated lore intro. It will be four minutes long, and you'll be able to skip it after you've seen it for the first time, even if you quit the prologue without saving your game (in fact, you can choose to skip most of the prologue after you've played it through once, though you might want to play it a couple times to see the alternate scenes you get for making various choices).

As you can see from Will's picture above, I've changed how sprites are named before you know their actual name. Originally I had them listed as "???", but while doing accessibility research I realized that's not friendly for readers who are using Ren'py's self voicing feature. So instead of ???, they will now be listed with some kind of description, such as "Bandit," until you learn their name.

That's it for 2021. What a year! Speaking in Avalon dialect, here's hoping we can get a handle on this rotted pandemic in 2022. See you then!