Weekly Devlog: 7 - 13 April 2025

Hello Patrons 💖

It's been another week of working on Chapter 12 and I'm happy to announce that all preparation scenes are completed. For the sake of time, I've left out a bit, but it's nothing overly important so I'll add them in edits.

From tomorrow, I'll be working on the main combat/battle scenes. If you think it's going to be easy in terms of coding/writing, think again. I'm doing what I had originally planned for Chapter 10 but scrapped it because of the sheer madness. Each path you choose will allow you to complete it using your four main stats. So even if you take a combat path, you can complete it using leadership, divinity etc.

Each path has a success, medium success and failure outcome so there's a lot to write and code. It's a bit of work because I also have to keep in mind the army count variable, the variables for the Nomad Tribes alliance or not and the overall sequence of scenes that are planned for the big battle. I can't say I'm looking forward to it 😅

That said, I'm going to do my best to complete the combat task this month. As I said in a previous devlog, April is a really good month for holidays where I live, and Easter Friday, Monday and the following weekend gives me extra long weekends and days off. I'm hoping to use this time to complete these rewarding (but annoying branching) scenes.

The demo has officially been updated for all tiers, so please, please ensure you've restarted the game if you haven't done so in V12.1. The reason is the army counter tracker starts at 120 but you get a 15 point addition in Chapter 10 depending on the Nomad/Hadi success and this will affect your overall score in Chapter 12 when we reach the failure or success of the battle. So if you've not restarted the game for any Chapter 12 updates, please do so now so you don't have to for the battle scenes.

And finally, on a note of the updated demo, recently a single person subscribed to bunch of different IF authors' Patreons and essentially scraped all content, including mine, and shared the demo and every bonus content on a popular pirating site which I've been wilfully ignoring for a while just because of the mental anguish/anger/rage it gives me. An IF author reached out to me to let me know, so I've gone and blocked the Patron but it's given me a lot to think about security and access to the game.

I'm not a proficient coder, but I've done enough research to try my hand at trying to make the game harder to download from itch.io and to make the html code and variables difficult to understand. I'm also going to work on adding a game tracker to the files to keep track of any copy that gets distributed so I'll know exactly who's leaking each copy when it happens.

The bad news, expect more security from now on but the good news is that this just might be the thing to keep the pirates at bay 🤞 And if it works as intended, it'll be something I can do for any future project I work on.

Thank you for your support and for those of you who continue to remain active on Patreon 💖✨️ I probably would have given up on the game if it weren't for you so please continue to engage and ask questions. I really appreciate all your patience and support 🌸