Weekly Update (4-29-2024) (Patreon)

This past week ended up being a lot more exhausting than I anticipated. Finishing my playtest run was just very long, considering reading all the dialog was kind of the point. At some point I need to fully test every branch of some parts as well. Aside from that, updating all the media on all the posts everywhere took most of friday, and getting the trailers remade took all of saturday. I don't hate video editing, per se, but remaking them was a pretty unenjoyable experience because it was purely the rote work part (taking and inserting clips) and none of the creative work since that was already done.

I tried to do some promotion yesterday, with mixed results. I forgot a detail on my post on one of the biggest subreddits I can post that got my post deleted, so I need to wait until next sunday to post again. On the other hand, the new art seems to have increased traffic by a lot. There's been way more traffic on itch and Steam compared to previous releases. I used one of my steam visibility periods this update. Last time I used one, it ran for a month in november and resulted in very poor performance overall. The one I started saturday night has only been up for about 36 hours and has already had 60% of the effect. Am debating whether there's any value in buying YouTube promotion for the trailer or not.

Anyway, I think I need to take a few days to recover after that push, then I'll get started on v0.12 properly. Although I hope to get it done within the usual 3-month window from the release of the last update, I can't promise that this time since the public release required so much extra work. We'll just have to see how it goes. It will be a shorter update, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

With the Sindarion changes in, I'm also giving some thought to a few adjustments to Cynthia. Nothing as radical, but for example, I feel like Bloodfury rarely sees any use as it is, and it would be more useful if it generated fury instead of consuming it. I may also consider giving her another low- or no-cooldown Fury builder that's not a combo. It wouldn't be as efficient as a combo, but would be a bit more consistently available, etc. Feel free to share any thoughts you have on this, since I'm still in the thinking about it phase.