Hello, sprouts! (Is this the final time I'll call you sprout? Well, you'll always be a sprout to Thurin.)

The prologue is finally finished! Woo~! The entire thing is a lot longer than I'd planned, like, a lot longer. I'm feeling so-so about it and would have preferred to improve it but had my personal deadline to release it within the first week of the month, and I'm cutting it reaaaaal close.

I had some difficulty finding the time and then the will to continue after accidentally deleting my initial draft (of which I was so proud T_T), and then making several rewrites, none of which satisfied me as my first writing had. I do believe that I can reach the same standard I started this game with, and that means I have to clear my head and find time to sit down for a few hours and get into a rhythm again.

Despite my words here, I really am pleased with myself for reaching my given deadline with a complete working prologue despite the hurdles thrown at me. It's a good indication that I can do better in future when I use the full time given( and don't lose the majority of my progress near the end).

There were a lot of conditional texts in this update, so I'm guessing that most of you will miss a fair bit. Did Aslaug come visit you when Sharla escorted you to your new home? If so, what manner of visit? Was Vaine nice to you, ambivalent or hostile? Your choice after the fight does change several scenes in these new pages, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot. I'm very curious to know what people chose to do.

This update includes:

• Prevented the protagonist having the same name or alias as a member of their Stem.
• Quickstart (when you start a new game, it's at the bottom of the game mechanics)
• Completed prologue
• Completed character setup
• Fixed more typos!
• Fixed Thurin not leaving your party during Sharla's scenes. If you've saved past the point that he and Tananthia leave you with Sharla, then that's stuck there for now unless you replay. My bad.
• Unlocked POV stories page at the end of the prologue.
• Unlocked Blackthorn Allies page after meeting everyone for the first time.
• The promised they/them pronoun option. This is not a society that takes this seriously, so no one would have paid attention to you if you'd tried to enforce this, but these guys don't care and will accept your desire to specified as non-binary. However, the society at large will still get this wrong and call you he/she. During missions, the allies will also do so when around other people because it will attract less attention. They aren't doing it to be malicious in this case.
• Additional portraits. Now the cast can emote!
• Hints of a possible home customization? (gotta find more ways to use all that money you'll get!)

In my previous post, I encouraged you all to restart to update the initial information stored in the game, well, eheh, maybe you kinda didn't need to? I've added more portraits to and loaded an older save to bug test something else and they worked. I was surprised but I won't grumble. On the off chance that they don't work for you, I have made a quickstart option under a new game which will partially create your character and skip you to the new content where you can finish your Thorn.

In the next chapter this will change to make a full character and skip the prologue entirely, but I'll probably make a few quality control updates before that happens.

For these, I plan to include:

• Finishing the battle texts
• Finishing the POV stories.
• More details for the character profiles in the unlocked ally page.
• The other portraits for Thurin (x2), Sharla (x2), Aslaug (x2) and Kelka (x1) and then fit them into the scenes. The macros already work, they just need a file.
• I do plan to go over the writing and improving it at some point. While I am content with some of it, I can already see how parts could be improved. Both variations of the bad end could be expanded, for example. Also, I'd originally planned training scenes when you select your skill levels but ran out of time after hurriedly finishing the more important scenes. I will keep the quickstart in place so it is easy to reach them after this has happened, should anyone care to go through the second part of the prologue again after the rewrite.

That's all for now, so thank you for taking the time to play and read these ramblings, and I hope you'll stick around for the next update.

Ta ta for now~

De'Gloughan

Since it's close to valentine's day, here's another chibi I made just for this, back when progress was going well. Ah, Frodi. He'll say/do anything to annoy Vaine.

And because I needed a break from writing at one point after plunging into a deep despair for losing my first draft, I made a little chibi stripe of the characters. Here you go! How do you like being Frodi's and Kelka's interesting new toy?