Greetings, fellow Kyosians!
We're happy to let you know that the work on Thea's route has been going well!
Thea's route is the second longest after Nod's, and it can be roughly divided into three big parts. We're currently working on the second part, and we hope to finish the route in the middle of the year... This year : )
I shared another winter screenshot with you in our previous update, and some people expressed their concern about Thea freezing to death. Don't worry, we already tried to kill her once, so this time we got her covered - literally:
Variants of Thea's "winter outfit" by Demi. Can you guess which one we picked?
Other players wondered if the rest of Thea's route will take place in the same locations as Nod's. Not to worry either! Thanks to Adam's relentless work, most of the areas that Thea visits in Royce are either entirely new...
...or can be seen from a new angle, so to speak:
Wait, sorry, that screenshot is missing one important detail:
I wish I could share more screenshots with you, but it's a bit risky - now that Nod's route is out, they're full of spoilers! What I can tell you is that Thea will get her own skill, just like all other playable characters. Originally we didn't intend for her to have one, but since we want to keep the gameplay engaging and diverse, and Thea's route is quite long, we decided to spice things up a bit.
***MINOR SPOILER ALERT***
Without going into too much detail, Thea's skill will allow her to see the location that she's at from the outside (under certain conditions). For example, here's one of the locations that she visits in "normal" mode:
And here's how it looks with Thea's skill in action:
This gives us an opportunity to use some pretty cool (hopefully) concepts visual, puzzle and story-wise.
***END MINOR SPOILERS!***
In parallel, we've been working on the improvements based on the feedback we got so far from our Early Access stage (huge thanks to everyone who provided it!) - like this chapter select screen, which has replaced character selection screen, and which will allow you to start from different parts of the game:
Most of the screen is blocked, of course... huge spoilers! Anyway, in addition to selecting where to start from, we want you to also be able to pick a set of choices that you've unlocked prior to that point. That way you won't need to replay the whole route, or even game, several times just to try various combinations of those choices. Let's try and save some of those poor kittens!
I'll be honest with you, this is NOT an easy screen to make, and it's still a work in progress... But I hope it'll make your navigation throughout the game much more convenient! Ideally, it will be complimented by a manual save system with the same feature, and perhaps later we will also add indicators for missed extras (cards, artwork and music) - this screen seems to be well-suited for that.
Some other things that we're working on based on feedback (that we plan to roll out with Thea's route):
– Proper output of Chinese language (without that horrible extra symbol bug - I'm really sorry that it turned out to be such a problem to fix!)
– Optimized elevator descent scene - some players had issues with it (up to the point of the game becoming unplayable), which is most likely caused by unoptimized assets and animations; we've decided to rebuild this sequence from scratch to address this
– Adjusted post-Bygone puzzle - it turned out to be very confusing, so we're replacing it with visual-based exploration (no text wall!)
– Some other minor bug fixes and improvements
Other requested features that we're keeping in mind (most likely for Mentor's route release or later):
– Gamepad/touch controls support
– Auto-dialogue option
And that's that! As usual, let me know if you have any questions or comments, and we hope that you're looking forward to Thea's adventure!
Love ♡🐧
Nick and u7committee