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September 17 Update (Patreon)

Published:
2017-09-17 22:16:24
Edited:
2017-09-17 22:18:05
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Welp, so far I've done a bad job relaxing this break. This update will be a more casual one, first me listing a number of items of note, then rambling about some of what I hope to be doing.

There has been a bunch of Crimson Gray stuff going on lately, take a look:

Crimson Gray is on sale on Steam, 25% off. We've hit 38 reviews, only 12 more to reach the 50 cutoff!

A YouTuber has finished his playthrough of Crimson Gray. I'll link his first video and you can check out the rest if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K2PMttgT3I

Thanks to those of you who voted on the Newgrounds version. Demos usually get worse ratings and don't get featured, so it did okay given those factors. Thanks to you guys, we did get the "Underdog of the Week" award, which will help the game get some attention.

Anyway, on relaxing. I have two primary hobbies: reading and gaming. Since I work in games now, I've become fiercely protective of my reading time and games tend to fall by the wayside. I wonder if I'd become a novelist if it would have been the other way around, but anyway, I have two games I had to set aside that I hope to get back into. 

I'm intend to finish my second run of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This game was on my to-play list for ages before I finally got a copy and started enjoying it. I wished I'd chosen Classic instead of Normal, so we'll see how that goes.

Crypt of the Necrodancer is an extremely fun little game. I say that as a fan of rogue-lites but not really a fan of rhythm games. Difficult but fundamentally fair. This is a good game to play in short sessions, I look forward to getting back into it.

Hopefully I'll be able to relax and play a decent amount of both of those over my break. Of course, creating is my favorite thing to do, so I'll definitely be working on stuff as well. If all goes well, my next post will be a Desecration of Wings announcement, but we'll see.

Comments

tyler velasco

Have you gotten a chance to read the night angel trilogy ? That was always a personal favorite of mine . Hopefully you blow up quickly because I enjoy your story telling.

Decanter

What's the significance of 50 reviews, if any?

FigelNarage

Is there a discord for this game? I've been paying attention for so long i didnt even bother to ask, also if you have a group of friends that like to get drunk and shitpost I recommend playing Golf with your Friends

Argenten

What have we said about you resting? You have earned a break, so no pushing :p

Adrian Tlurker

As a published author(just 1 book) and having been writing for over 20 years I can, for me personally, it hasn't slowed my reading 1 bit. Take it easy, sit back and just let yourself fall into a world someone else created for a bit. It'll ease a lot of stress.

sierralee

By Brent Weeks? Yup, read all three! And thanks!

sierralee

The Steam visibility algorithm values quantity of reviews over quality, such that 100% positive with <50 reviews is rated "worse" than 61% positive with 50 reviews. Though this is unlikely to make or break the game, reaching 50 would help the game be seen by more people.

sierralee

Sorry, no Discord, though that does seem to be a common request. Thanks for the recommendation!

KarmaBus

As far as well written, thought provoking stories go, I've found the Thomas Covenant series to be absolutely excellent. Written by Stephen Donaldson.

sierralee

A good suggestion, I quite enjoyed the series!

DukeLeto7

Well, now that you are specifically saying you are trying to maintain a modicum of free time, I think that's the cue for me to unload my list of TLS timeline/history contradictions so as to impose on you. :) There is a lot of material, so I'm going to try and put them in individual limited sub posts to this, but there's a certain amount of inter-connectivity to some of the issues because they came up while trying to deduce the timeline of TLS.

DukeLeto7

1. How old is Hilstara really at the start of the game? She says that she has been 39 for two years when pressed about her age by Yarra in the lower tunnels of Devil's Pass in Chapter 1. But that means she would have been 16 at the time of Wendis' death and on active military service in the Ardan Army for some months or years prior to that. My assuming that Hilstara had to have been at least 18 when she met Simon and Wendis was pushing Wendis' death and the founding of Zirantia back several years when I first made the timeline. Fluid-Decanter observed that there was no reason for you NOT to have Hilstara have been a child soldier, or some kind of squire, but it still struck me that she ought to have been older than 16. Some other clues in the game suggest Hilstara might have been lying about her age still when she claimed 41 in chapter 1, specifically her saying to Galvia that she only has a few years of fighting left in Eustrin when she'd be ~43. My own guesstimate is between 43 and 47 at the start of chapter 1. (Minor Note: Hilstara says she served in the "Ardoheim Army" rather than the "Ardan" Army in this same conversation.)

DukeLeto7

1a.) How did Hilstara know that "everyone" knew Simon and Wendis would wind up together? During the drinking trip Simon and Hilstara have during Governing Yhilin III, Hilstara says the following. Hilstara: Some men said she must be using magic to convert the alcohol into, shall we say, additional cleavage. Simon: Really? I thought I'd heard all the strange ones about her. Hilstara: Oh, everyone could tell you two would get together, so they would have been cautious around you early on. I think I mentioned that this exchange was incredibly confusing and pushed back my first estimate of Wendis' death all the way to ~15 years after the end of the 2nd Arclent War, because the obvious conclusion one draws from the dialogue above is that Hilstara was serving with Simon and Wendis at the time of their marriage. Hilstara's service with both of them in Zirantia started at an absolute minimum around six years after their marriage, and probably closer to ten or eleven depending on the duration of the Zirantian campaign, and six years of extremely bloody war at that. Even assuming that Simon and Wendis were serving continuously in the same unit throughout that period, which is unlikely since (I think) Simon is supposed to have had his first command by the time of Zirantia and the Ardan army involvement was unofficial on at least some level, there aren't likely to have been all that many surviving people hanging around from whom Hilstara could have gathered with confidence what the attitudes of "everyone" in the unit towards Simon and Wendis' courtship would have been six to eleven years prior. (Especially if Hilstara was under sixteen at the time.) It's information she has no business having as casually as the line expresses it. My suggestion is to revise this passage so that the joke and the observation about what people thought of them when they served together is displaced to a character who served with Simon and Wendis before their marriage and at the time of the Zirantian campaign, and who talked to Hilstara about them there.

DukeLeto7

2. How long do Zirantians live? There's spat between Ambassador Uolian and the Merchant Guilds' Rep near the beginning of the Ardford Summit in which the Merchant rep asks if Uolian was even alive during the war, and if any Zirantians were alive then. (Don't have the exact wording, sorry.) That would seem to indicate that the average Zirantian lifespan is less than 30 years, and that this fact is common knowledge. But, via the ages our friend Lostone2 obtained from you via the wiki, the known Zirantian characters all have ages between 20 and 30, and none of them seem to be anything other than in the prime of life. (This question came up because Zirantia had to have been founded before Uyae was born for her to be recruited into the Divine Claw at birth, which would have been 22 years before the Zirantian visit in 1155 AE, assuming there's no such thing as "Zirantian Years" like the ages for succubi. As it is, the question about Zirantian lifespans just looks out of place.)

DukeLeto7

3. How many lost Elven Kingdoms are there and where were they? I'n pretty sure this actually is a continuity gaffe, because Altina's speech about the ruined shrine on the Withered Mountain in the Prologue has apparently already been revised once when the map of Arclent was drawn. Altina tells Kai that there used to be two Elven kingdoms in the west prior to their being destroyed by the Incubus King. I had assumed that one of them had to have been in the Southwest in the area near Feroholm, since it seemed unlikely that the elves from the Northwest of the IKD would have traipsed a good way into what is now Ardoheim to erect a shrine to one of their sages on the Withered Mountain. Simon made reference to the theologians of the NW elf kingdom in a conversation with Neranda, so I assumed that there were two elf kingdoms, one in the NW and one in the SW. However, in the aftermath meeting following the death of the IK, Simon asks Lynine: "Do you think it's likely that Darghelon would want to revive ONE of the northern elven kingdoms?" As in there are more than one of the two elf kingdoms in the west of Arclent being in the north, precluding on in the southwest. So there's an apparent contradiction. Either Altina was wrong about there being only two elf kingdoms in the west OR there's some other more convoluted explanation besides a destroyed SW elf kingdom in the vicinity of Feroholm for the shrine on the Withered Mountain. Decanter and Fulminato have suggested the circle can be squared by assuming that the lost kingdoms were "north" relative to a mapmaker in Ardford, but by that definition, Darghelon and Gheldaron are northern kingdoms too. I'd revise Altina's speech to three eld kingdoms or emend Simon's question so that he's asking Lynine about one of the western elf kingdoms.

DukeLeto7

3a.) Where is the Withered Mountain relative to Feroholm? The map used in the Wall of Ivala animation has the Withered Mountain roughly due south of Feroholm, whereas the Feroholm region map from Chapter 2 seemed to place it more to the West, near the line of mountains on the border near the Watchtowers. I think the latter makes a bit more sense geographically.

DukeLeto7

3b.) Where exactly is the territory of "Ruined Kingdoms" annexed by Ardoheim after the 2nd Arclent War? Megail mentions this happened in the campfire conversation in the wastelands during her path. There are two schools of thought on this, and I've argued for both. One is that Ferholm and Stineford are the annexed territories, the other is that they are the part of what is now Ardoheim to the west and southwest of Feroholm on the Arclent Map, the only location we know being there is "The Knife" (and only by way of the Wall of Ivala map). This has some relation to the question of where the Withered Mountain is. If the Withered Mountain, which is presumed to have been part of one of the Ruined Kingdoms, is on a roughly straight line between Feroholm and Ardford, then it is unlikely that Feroholm was part of Ardoheim before the war.

DukeLeto7

Technically, this DOES count as getting you to read more.

Lord Forte Games

As someone who shares those primary hobbies and has gone into a more literary-focused career (though sadly nonfiction rather than fiction for the time being), I do think I've gravitated more toward gaming because of that, though I don't necessarily think it's the only reason. It's an interesting question to think about... Since others are throwing out reading suggestions, I might as well add mine: If you haven't read it, I think the Dragon Prince trilogy by Melanie Rawn is quite excellent, and based on a lot of what you've created in TLS, I think you'd enjoy the themes. Rohan and Simon may struggle with the ethical issues of having and using power differently, but there's a certain core similarity there... As an aside, not to sound like too much of a flatterer, but a game I played recently made me think about why, despite overall enjoying it, it left me somewhat unsatisfied, and similarly one thing I really appreciate in TLS. Ultimately, I decided it was because the game couldn't decide what it wanted to be--it was a weird mix of harem and route-based romance--which ended up letting a lot of awesome potential go to waste. At one character who would've made a great route heroine fell into the side harem and at the same time the whole side harem really detracted from the romantic part of the main routes and just... eh. And I realized a lot of the works I've enjoyed over the years, like Fate/stay night, have left me with similar feelings of "This was a great idea but they really screwed it up in execution." While obviously I can't say for sure how TLS's ending will make me feel, everything so far suggests that I won't have that kind of feeling when it comes around. Anyway, rambling aside, I hope you manage to actually get some rest now.. Serious stuff infringing on relaxation stuff beyond a point is super tiring, and you definitely deserve some real break on your break!

sierralee

Well, I'm certainly glad that you enjoy my writing. ^-^ Executing a story's deepest ideas well and leaving it with a satisfying feeling is very important to me, so I hope everybody likes it!

Edward Culham

Talking about the elf kingdoms, when at Withered Mountain, it specifically says that they were more North leading to the fact that would likely be the Southern boarder of one of the elf kingdoms. Now assuming that is true, that would mean from the elves that live in Darghelon and Gheldaron would be North starting to go into the Incubus Territory.

sierralee

1) Joining the military in a support role at 14 and in active military service at 16 sounds acceptable to me in a late medieval setting. Thanks for pointing out the wrong adjectival form, though, fixed. 1a) Yeah, I think it's probably better to edit this one. 2) This involves a worldbuilding detail you haven't been given yet. Given good nutrition and health care, Zirantian lifespans would be only somewhat shorter than humans. However, their society has a strong survival of the fittest mentality, leading to their average age at death being much lower than their potential maximum. 3) Yeah, this is a mistake due to the continent getting rotated when we were doing mapping, for realism purposes. My mental construction of the continent still has the original northern orientation. 3a) The regional map is correct, the elaborate map should be corrected eventually. 3b) Both the regions you refer to were ruined kingdoms annexed by Ardoheim. Feroholm was not part of Ardoheim before the war.

Michael Hutchins

I just became a backer so I'm catching g up...holy shit you did a lot of math in your head just to try to figure out the age of someone

Dreikaiserbund

After about 35 hours, give or take, I have finally reached the end of the current content (my last playthrough took me up to Darghelon and Gheldaron). And I just want to say that TLS is an absolutely amazing, mind-bogglingly well-made game. And I've played Planescape: Torment, VtM: Bloodlines, and Baldur's Gate II, so I know whereof I speak when it comes to quality RPGs. The writing is top-notch, the story is legitimately fascinating (I don't think I've ever seen another game actually explore the mechanics of gaining power in such a way), and the economic/political gameplay is genuinely engrossing (I have made spreadsheets, I don't think I have ever done this for a game before). Also, it is ****ing hot. So, just want to say that I love the game, have been a patron for two years (so Patreon tells me), and I don't regret it for an instant.

Michael Hutchins

the only thing i didnt like was not having the ability to grind to the point that i didnt have to make a choice on investments in the city

DukeLeto7

1) Fun fact: IIRC the "Age of Knighthood" as 21 originated in the high middle ages because boys would have to be fully grown and have a few years of training to adequately fight in heavy armor. (Also because you didn't want to have to make a new suit every 6 months owing to growth spurts.) Heavy Armor is, of course, Hilstara's hat. But trainee knights were squires as teenagers, so I think this could work, especially in a situation where manpower has been sapped to the max. 1a) Oh joy, an excuse for another playthrough! 2) So human bigots just assume Zirantian lives are nasty, brutish and short. :( 3) So, for the record, are there two WESTERN elf kingdoms and will Simon's dialogue with Lynine be edited? If so, you might also check Simon's conversation with Neranda on Dwarren atheism, I think that refers to two NW elf kingdom theologians... 3b) And is Stineford also a new acquisition? (You weren't specific and the name pattern matches with Ardford...) One more question... The late lamented IK was "trapped in Devil's Pass for several months" in the 2nd Arclent War. Why didn't he just teleport out?

DukeLeto7

And of course, thanks for taking the time to address my questions.

sierralee

1) Also, internal magic cycles make it possible to wear heavy armor much earlier than in the real world. 3) Correct. 3b) Yes, it was a new acquisition. There were many cultural and linguistic similarities between Ardoheim and the former nations of that region, they were mostly separated by politics that will be relevant later. Re: Teleportation - As you've seen at several points in the game, a major part of military strategy involving important individuals is suppression of teleportation magic. The IK was pinned there via large scale divine magic, akin to a milder version of Ivala's Wall from the recent war.

sierralee

Thank you very much for all your support!

DukeLeto7

Just one more question... <a href="http://i.imgflip.com/mcdcy.jpg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://i.imgflip.com/mcdcy.jpg</a> (is a British game author going to get a Columbo joke? Nevermind...) What about the huge tract of land Ardoheim has East of Stineford and Delgar Forest but west of Darghelon on the Arclent map? Also new acquisition? (One of the arguments in favor of Stineford being former Ardan territory was how difficult it would have been to maintain military control over that region from Ardford if Stineford and Feroholm were not part of the kingdom, since the forest and the big river feeding into that major bay would be a natural defensive choke point.)

sierralee

I'm British now? The area you refer to is more recent than the heart of Ardoheim in the west, but not as new as the recent acquisitions. This will also be relevant during the future segment that gets into subdivisions of Ardoheim.

DukeLeto7

It was a fairly strong presumption on my part that you're a native British English speaker rather than an American based on the number of non-US English idioms that crop up in the game's dialogue. ("Arse" instead of "ass" in early Feroholm; Yhilini form good "queues" instead of "lines" in front of the House of Petitions; Wynn says the Shining Swords will "come in useful" instead of "come in handy" in the pyramid...) Statistically, the most likely options apart from you being a British native are Australian or Canadian (but I think the US now exerts more linguistic influence on the hosers than the mother country), followed by the Kiwis, followed by an EU citizen of another native language who has resided in Britain and soaked up conversational English there, instead of a school which is more oriented towards American English norms. Then, perhaps, Belize or British Guyana or Jamaica or one of the really small Caribbean islands, but the likelihood is that some Caribbean expressions would have slipped in. Indian is an outside chance, but I think subcontinental English has its own idiomatic quirks separate from British or American, but I haven't consumed enough Indian English media to recognize the tells on that. The rest of the former commonwealth is a small enough part of the Internet using population and tends not to use English in everyday speech sufficiently to acquire idioms unique to the two big dialects. Those were my reasons for assuming British, so I'm sorry if I've offended you by being mistaken or surprised your incognito. :)

Grimwauld

Just finished a playthrough. Haven't played in quite some time. Freaking epic. All I can say, just epic. Love the exposition at the end, so excited for more!