Hello, residents of Rue Valley!
We hope you’ve had a great week! For our team, it’s been frantic, but incredible. Seeing you all playing Rue Valley and sharing your stories, and reading your feedback about our game—it’s the best experience we could have as developers. And we want to thank you for all of it: for your trust, for your support, for your feedback, and for your critiques! And most of all, thank you for playing Rue Valley!
Now, we’d like to go over some of the things we’ve learned from your feedback so far:
We are aware that some voice-over is missing or doesn’t match the text, and we are actively working on a fix. Keep in mind that Eugene and his inner monologue are deliberately unvoiced, and this is not a bug. We only planned to voice the NPCs, and while we understand that many people would prefer to hear the narrator speak as well, this is not something we’re able to provide at present.
We also saw a lot of complaints about not having enough inspiration points. We looked into your saves and bug reports, and thankfully, it’s not a bug—there are still a few places where you can collect missing inspiration. So, if you find yourself getting stuck because of this, try examining the different locations around Rue Valley more carefully and completing any unfinished intentions you might have left—you should be able to find enough inspiration to keep going through to the end. Meanwhile, we will also think about ways we can improve your experience in the coming updates.
We also received a number of reports about other bugs, and we are already looking into them. Next week, we will release the first patch that will fix some issues with voice-over, observations (i.e., will add some extra interactions with the environment), some animation fixes.
After that, we will start working on a community patch. We plan to improve the final part of the game and the endings. We also saw your feedback regarding the characters, and we will try to make it so that interacting with them and learning their stories would feel more Impactful.
Not only that, but we won’t stop supporting the game after the community patch, and will keep you posted about our future plans.
While you’re here, you can also check the dev stream we did yesterday with Owlcat Games if you haven’t already:
We mainly discussed narrative design, Mr. Harrow as a protagonist, the challenges of building relationships with characters who don’t remember you, and writing and talking about mental health.
Thank you for playing and helping us improve Rue Valley!
Love, Emotion Spark Studio