Hi everyone! Thanks so much for your patience with our skipped October update. We're in that awkward stage of development where it's a lot of writing and behind-the-scenes work, so we just didn't have a lot to show last month.

The Writing Department:

I've hit my first major milestone in Robin's route! Here's hoping that writing goes ever faster from here on out. It's been a huge struggle for me since my bout with long Covid, because my brain keeps fighting me and making it difficult for me to pull out words. But I've been writing some fanfic and that's actually been helping me make more progress on Made Marion's script as I retrain my skull-encased electrified tapioca to string sentences together. Check our socials over the next month (or maybe just Tumblr, who knows how long Twitter will be up at this juncture) if you're a fan of Gilded Shadows and want to see me playing around with the crew from Quill's route. I'll post a link when I'm done!

The Art Department:

Our redesigned Nottingham sprites are thiiiis close to done. They'll probably be released fairly close to each other, as Arrapso is putting final touches on all of them. In the meantime, we have some lovely side characters to introduce!

Ysolt, on the left, may be familiar to some of you who check our Discord. She was a possible backer-designed sprite who wasn't claimed by our character design backers, so we collected suggestions from our Discord participants for her design! 

At the start of the game, Geoffrey's old Lady Chamberlain is about to get married and quit her job. He needs somebody to run Nottingham Hold, which is partly why he was closing his marriage contract with Marion's father. What happens when his prospective bride disappears or runs away with the Sherwood rebels and he never meets or is rejected by "Lady Anne"? He hires the recently-widowed Lady Ysolt to be his new Lady Chamberlain. She works for him on every route except Geoff/Gui's and Alanna's. She looks quite competent, doesn't she?

On the right is Fawzia. She is many things: freebooter turned smuggler, Meissa's friend, unsung hero of the internal revolt that ended the Nibirian War. She's the reason Meissa has so many nice Nibirian fabrics and art objects in their home. She also helps supply the Rebellion. As someone who left her native Sunjata due to her lack of citizenship status in any city-state, Fawzia is a fan of freedom movements. Fun fact: She will be a love interest in our third planned game, Fatebreaker, which is set during the Nibirian revolt. Sorry to those of you who would like to romance her now - never fear, you can romance her slightly younger self later!

The Programming Department:

Every time I swear I'm done with screens (any of y'all who have played with Ren'py know what I'm talking about), I remember that the darn things can be very useful sometimes.

In our demo, a game over greets the player with a black screen and the name of the ending they have just received in our normal dialogue box. That's not particularly attractive, so I've added a special ending screen so you can mourn your poor choices or celebrate your good ones.

Neutral endings, like the one pictured above, come with a sepia tone screen. Good endings are full color and bad endings are black and white - perhaps with a bit of blood splatter for those really bad endings.

We are Hiring!

We are currently looking for a freelance 2D Visual FX artist to join our team for a series of commissions over the rest of development. We're looking for some simple animations to spruce up the game, such as sword swing FX during combat scenes and some magic spell effects. Please see our job announcement and if you or anybody you know is a freelance artist with animated VFX skills, contact me via Twitter, Tumblr, or Discord (I don't recommend KS because we're moving quickly and it doesn't always alert me when I have messages).

That's the Made Marion news from November! See you next month!