Weekly Update (10-6-2025)

More progress this week.

Overall, I got enough done that I feel a lot closer to caught up, which makes me feel better in general. I'd hoped to hit 20k this weekend, but this is close enough to not feel bad about, and I had some fun emergent ideas that I look forward to people seeing.

I'm still dealing with IRL stuff, so things aren't great, but just not feeling massively behind makes me feel a lot better than I have been. Forward, relentlessly.

In other news, it feels like the update has continued to have a decently long tail. Daily active users on steam are still down from the post-update highs, of course, but the number is still pretty elevated for being a month out from the public release. And, of course, we have some new people here, so let me take this chance to bid them welcome. ^^

I mentioned a while back that I would post the filled in Avalonian calendar at some point. This isn't a super priority, but I may try to do that this week. The main change it will require is that the dukes' visit in Chapter 5 be noted as falling on the Feast of Caelon, as opposed to that happening in Chapter 6. I think this can mostly be handled by an invocation of the Feast at the banquet that day and adjusting some spots later to say that we did technically celebrate it, just not properly.

I can't recall if I've mentioned this specific aspect before (well okay, I checked after writing that and I did two weeks ago, but I'm gonna talk about it anyway. >.>; <.<;), but something else I'm hoping to finally implement this update is the "Paragon Loyalty" (that is, loyalty past 100) system with bonuses. As with so many things, putting actual numbers to the bonuses from that is the hard part, but it's still something I've wanted to implement for a while (I know I've mentioned the basic idea, at least). It's something that I view as both solving a common problem in games where your favorites stop mattering once you "max" them in whatever system the game has as well as something that contributes to my overall goal of gameplay and story integration (the people you're closest to will fight the hardest for you in combat).

Also, we had some interesting discussions of how to handle war mechanics in the days ahead on the discord. Obviously I'll be designing those as I think best in the end, but it was interesting to see people's thoughts on the topic. And in general, it's something I'm looking forward to. I think they represent the place I'll be breaking the most new ground in terms of how a ruler RPG works.

Anyway, for now, back to getting fully caught up and beyond!