All of the recent development work has been focused on some of the combat scenes that you might encounter during this update. Based on some of your choices, past and present, you will have a number of possibly violent interactions. I have been working on posing and rendering these scenes, which are a little more involved than the standard dialogue images. Using a combination of action images and narration I am hoping to create fight scenes similar to the one you previously had in the tavern. Like the tavern fight, there is at least 1 combat that you can lose which will change the direction of the story for your playthrough.
A good portion of the action this update will take place at Castle Helmsworth, where you plan to rescue Branson's remaining family members. There will be a few different paths for these scenes depending on who is with you and what choices you make. I have been working on rendering out all the images to cover any of the different outcomes, starting with you meeting and rescuing Caleb's captives.
A big milestone I discovered when I was running some linting on my code was that the script for the game has grown to over 100,000 words of dialogue. This is just the story text that has been added to the game files. I still have a large amount of the dialogue and story text for this update that still need to be added to the game files. With myself and my family travelling for the upcoming holidays I plan to finalize the story dialogue and game script since I just have my laptop with me while I am on the go. Once I am back home after the holidays it will be back to cranking out as many renders as I can for the upcoming steam release.
This will probably be the last development update I do until the official release on Steam. If you have played the demo, that consisted of the initial release and the 2nd content release. The Steam release will contain the full game up through the 4th release along with UI updates, new image and replay galleries, a new journal system and a host of smaller quality of life improvements.
So until then, I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year!