Hi everyone!

Tim here, CEO of the publisher Hooded Horse, and I'm once again back for another development news post. It's been about a month since my January post, and the dev team has been hard at work in the final stages of getting the update ready to be tried out by all of you.

Today's post will be a bit shorter than January given I don't want to distract the dev team from finalizing the update by asking them for quite as much info as last time, but I did get them to give me a peek at the upcoming changelog, as well as gather some cool screenshots. The upcoming update, aside from the features discussed in the January post, is heavily focused on bug fixing, balancing, and especially a major focus on optimizing the game. We're really excited for all of you to see what has been achieved there.

There's also a new map added to the game. See if you can spot which of the below screenshots features that new map, though all the shots feature something cool.

By the way, it would be natural to ask "so when exactly does the update release if you are saying it's very close?" The answer there is "It's so close we don't ourselves know" -- at the end of an update getting ready it enters that final stage of bringing everything together and making sure it's all working right to get to you, and at that moment it becomes a case where we no longer know, is that a few days, or is that more than a week, it's not clear to us because everyone is just racing to get it done and into your hands while making sure what gets into your hands is ready for those hands (testing and squashing as many bugs as we can, while knowing some will remain and will have to be discovered in public testing). Hopefully that answer doesn't bother people and I don't get 100 responses telling me I'm terrible for not knowing an exact day, I feel it's kind of the risky answer where community management professionals are going to look at it and say "that's why you don't let the CEO talk to the community." But it's honestly where things are at, and I wanted to be direct on that.

Thank you all for playing and all your support! I can never express enough how grateful all of us here are for the incredible community behind Manor Lords, you are amazing.

Tim