Dear Villainesses and Villains:
This is Tanya and Emily, the devs of Save the Villainess – and we hope you’re staying safe in the scorching summer heat! In this newsletter, we'll tell you about our soon-to-arrive demo and Kickstarter launch, introduce a fun secret, and share some progress on our novel. We have great news coming up!
We are working through the process to release Save the Villainess' public demo and Kickstarter campaign this July! Some of the timing will depend on approval processes beyond our control, but we are confident we will be able to share this with you soon.
We originally planned to release our demo and Kickstarter campaign this June… but we realized that in June, Steam hosts its annual Summer Sale and a giant NextFest for thousands of games. Instead of competing with these events, we spent June polishing up our demo and setting the stage for later parts of our game. We now have a demo that’s better than ever and hope you are excited for our projected late-July release!
Right now, we have worked through over 40 pages of notes for optimization and added bonus information. Emily has also revised and optimized all of our game’s beautiful characters, backgrounds, and cut-scenes so that the game runs as smoothly as possible while offering a fully animated and immersive world to explore. Thanks to our amazing beta testers, we now have a good idea of the minimum range of computer specs that can handle our game. We will use that information to help people determine what to use to play the demo!
Currently, the prologue has 1,500 lines of code. Meanwhile, Chapter 1 has 27,300 lines and Chapter 2 has 36,200 lines of code up to the end of the demo. We’ll be reusing some of this very important code (not including the code for things like the animated backgrounds and characters, which are in separate files) for the rest of our game, so creating stable code is really important!
We also have more secrets in our game than ever. Try out different foods at the start of the demo! See what happens if you replay tutorials… or skip them entirely! See if you can find all the new surprises we have hidden in the demo!
We will be submitting our demo build to Steam for review very soon after doing some testing. Once Steam approves our build – a process that can take a few weeks – we will be ready to showcase our final demo and Kickstarter campaign to the world. We will let you know when our demo & Kickstarter campaign release with a countdown on our mailing list and social media sites!
While you wait for our final demo and Kickstarter campaign, we wanted to introduce a fun new secret – the first of many character portraits that will show up throughout our game!
You see this lovely lady? This is Merlina and she is a portrait of someone we dearly love… one of our strongest and earliest supporters and champions. Her portrait was drawn by our amazing sprite artists at Somate Studio and comes to life within our game, complete with a few hidden secrets...
In our upcoming Kickstarter, you can secure your own animated, in-game portrait! Your portrait will be drawn by the master artists at Somate Studio and will be a major part of the plot in the final sections of the game. You too can share a stage with Jane and her suspicious love interests if you choose to support this tier of the Kickstarter!
Be sure to tune into our Kickstarter for more details on how you could purchase a portrait as well as plenty of other beautiful but limited prizes!
We recently achieved two amazing new milestones. Firstly, our youtube channel achieved over 1,000 subscribers. Be sure to join us there for over one hundred unique Save the Villainess related videos!
Secondly, our Kickstarter precampaign page achieved over 900 supporters!
Thank you for your help in reaching this amazing goal. Thanks to your generous help, we hope to reach even more supporters before we launch... After all, our project would not be possible without you and your support!
If you’re interested in delving into more villainess shenanigans, you can take a look into our developing novel, “The Villainess Wants Her Prince to Live!”
You can find the novel on Royal Roads and Archive of Our Own.
Recently, we got an amazing review from Ebert on Royal Roads:
“I’m really liking this story so far. Initially started out with a classic villainess story premise; you know, visions of the future, arranged marriage to a prince, another “villainess” condemned at a party. Except, what’s this about deadly family dynamics? Why is the main character calling herself an in-bred shit in? Why does the prince (and currently presumed male lead) frolic so much? All the classic tropes of Villainess storylines, but with the humor and clever twists to revitalize one of my favorite types of stories.”
So if you want to read a story that takes every villainess story cliche you can think of and turns it on its head, try our novel today!
(Note: You don’t need to read the novel to enjoy or understand Save the Villainess – but you will learn a lot of fun lore about the world of Save the Villainess if you read it!)
May you all have an amazing (and not too searing) journey into summer. We cannot wait to release our demo & Kickstarter campaign and share so many surprises with you later this month. We just need Steam to give us permission now!
Finally, on our mailing list, we're also offering brand new character cards giving information about the what our main cast members would want to see in a portrait. Want those cards? Sign up for our mailing list today!