A Dark Bargain (Patreon)

Good evening,

It got a bit later than usual today. I wanted to finish the title image first so I could show a bit more clearly what I’ve been working on this week.

On Monday and Tuesday I was still very busy fixing bugs. It honestly felt like the issues with companions and other problems in the 0.6.2.0 update would never end. Even after I thought everything was fixed and the 0.6.2.0b version was released, I noticed another problem with Bianca. In Arenfield you now constantly get a message saying that she has left the party (It isn't something gamebreaking, but still annoying). I have already fixed it in the version I'm currently working on, but I didn’t make another hotfix for it. The fix will be included in the next update. Alongside the bug fixes I also reworked Gwen’s transformation animation so it finally looks the way I originally imagined it when I first created it.

Starting on Wednesday my main focus shifted back to Athia’s bonus scene. I worked on several positions and poses for her. The images are not final yet, but I hope to finish them next week.

After thinking about it for a while and reading back into all of her previous dialogues I also continued writing the actual story around Athia (I also changed a few lines of dialogue in her first appearance in the swamp + reworked her dialogue images for that and made new sprites for that). As I mentioned before, I want to use this scene to expand Athia’s quest a bit. Her quest line, if you chose to ally with her, was still left hanging quite a bit and I first needed to create some proper points where the story could continue.

While doing that I realized it’s not quite as simple as it seemed, since Syfa is no longer guaranteed to still be wandering around beneath the church. The quest originally ended at the point where Syfa had not yet gone to the monastery and you planned to meet her together with Athia beneath the church. But by now that situation may have already changed. So I had to write fitting scenarios for multiple possibilities. One of them is the one you can see in the title image. But it’s also possible that you imprisoned Syfa again, allied with her, left her beneath the church without restrictions, or even banished her completely. The image above shows just one possible scenario, but there are several other variations as well. Now I need to figure out how to bring all of these together without letting the whole thing branch out too much.

I have already written part of this quest as I mentioned, but there are still a few story branches missing that I want to continue working on next week.

Overall I’m quite satisfied with my progress on the scene, especially considering how much time I had to spend on bug fixes. Whether I can finish it by the end of next week remains to be seen. I want the result to feel complete, and the different paths for Athia, whether she becomes a goddess or a servant, add additional complications that also require more work. But the full vision for the scene is now clear in my head and I’ll try to bring it to life as quickly as possible.

With that said, I’m going to create a few more images now and then start my weekend. I wish you all a nice weekend!