Weekly Update

Well, it has been and week and not a highly productive one for me. Still I have put the first of the Kitaxxa scenes into the game and I am debugging it right now.

There probably won't be a release for a few weeks at least. The Kitaxxa scenes are more for the middle of the game and not the beginning. The artists are mostly working on the critical scenes first, not taking it it game order.

I will be working on things in game order now though for a while and you may see a lot of placeholder images in the next release, but hopefully you will start to get a better idea of what part 2 of the game is like.

BGrisset has just started to work on some of the Cerise images that are used in the early part of Part 2 so you will be seeing some excellent images soon I am sure.

This week I will leave you with one of my favourite pieces of architecture which you will see a little of in Part 2. It is the main Audience Hall for the Court of the Crimson Empress. (This first scenes or Part 2 are in the smaller private hall.)

Weekly Update

It has been a quiet week for us this week. Release 1.4 seems to be reasonably sound from the lack of comments which is not bad considering there has been over 400 downloads.

MedialFiles gives us total download numbers and Release 1.2.3 has had over 11,000 downloads which is pretty amazing I think.

There were some great suggestions in the survey. The card images are all rendered at twice the resolution you see them on the screen, so I am sure we can have some way of looking at those in full resolution as someone suggested.
The first Kitaxxa set of images is now complete and I am putting them into the game, reworking some of the code as I go.

A large part of Part 2 is about winning friends and allegiances through seducing them and having them fall for you basically. With Kitaxxa though, you do have to be careful not to get her too excited or you may need medical attention ...

New Release

You can download the new release here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/hb6lhol5hzf467g/ROCE-R1.4.0-all.zip
Caution, this is a large download for only a relatively small amount of new content. Most of the work is in the new spell system which is not really triggered until later in the game.
If you get to a screen where you cannot work out what to do, click on the tent.
This update concludes the introductory material for Part 2. After this you get to start playing card games again.

Survey Results

 Thankyou to everyone who responded to our survey. There was a lot of great information in there.

Congratulations respondent # 102 (of 115) for winning the draw. Your sponsor's site login details are in your EAZ inbox.

The basic statistics from the responses are below.

There were some great suggestions and I will be working through them as well.

There was a great suggestion about translations in exchange for access to the deluxe edition and we will look at that when the game is getting close to done. Translating too soon will be a maintenance nightmare I feel.

I will be looking at the alternate dark path closely. I think the animations are a given. The dark path will depend on what we can earn through comic sales and other revenue streams as we will not use the crowd funding money for that (and it is already fully committed).

For the dark path, we will need to work out if we can do something meaningful and interesting with the money we raise before we do it.

Summary

Would you buy a deluxe version of Redemption of the Crimson Empress or just stick with the free version?

I will just play the free version	17	15%
I will play the free version and if I like it will buy the deluxe version.	65	58%
I will buy the deluxe version.	21	19%
I will pirate the deluxe version.	3	3%
I will pirate the deluxe version and if it is really good, I will buy it.	7	6%

What would be a fair price for the deluxe version?

$5	10	9%
$10	32	29%
$15	38	34%
$20	20	18%
$30	2	2%
I would not buy it.	9	8%

What feature would you most like to see in the deluxe version?

Animated Scenes	53	46%
An alternate darker path through the story (where Bailey goes to the dark side)	55	48%
Other	6	5%

What would be your second choice for features in the deluxe version?

Animated Scenes	55	51%
An alternate darker path through the game	37	34%
Other	16	15%

Comic plus bonus access to deluxe material/version

No thanks	64	56%
I would pay $10 for that.	38	33%
I would pay $20 for that.	12	11%

Preferred Language

English	95	84%
Deutsch	5	4%
Français	4	4%
Polski	2	2%
русский	1	1%
Español	2	2%
Italiano	2	2%
Other	2	2%

Weekly Update

Well, it has been another busy week. I have given out Release 1.4 to a small set of people to look at and if there are no major problems I will make it generally available next weekend.

Release 1.4 finishes off the intro to Part 2 and you get to see one of the main navigation points. It also adds the spell system (in game helpers) although you won't be able to use them until later in the game unless you have the debug version.

The survey has gone really well and we have well over 100 responses. Thankyou to everyone who responded and we will be selecting the lucky winner in the next day or two.

Our artists are currently working on the most important scenes, but as we get through those, we can start working through things in game order a bit more. Initially I wanted to focus our resources on on what was most important, not what came first.

One of the survey respondents wanted to know how we were going and where we are up to, so I will try to give you some basic statistics as we know them now:

There are 64 image sequences in Part 2 of the game. Of those about 12 are either complete or well underway. It is hard to pin down exactly because we are doing some of them in parallel as it is more efficient that way. Sequences will have a minimum of 4 images each with some being 20 or 30, but don't expect a lot of those.

An April 2014 beta of the complete game is what we are aiming for and that is still looking good as a goal.

Outside of the art work, the code skeleton is in place and I am working back through it, putting in a simplified framework that I have developed for handling events. This should make it easier for to writers to take work with the game dialog as well.

Here is a sneak peek at Spells screen I mentioned above. You will not get all the spells at once, so you won't see the screen quite this full until you are well into the game.

That's it for today. Coming soon will be the announcement of the winner of the contest and Release 1.4.