Progress Report and Forthcoming Updates

[Mooncalf]

Just a short post to let you all know how things are going right now. Short answer: slowly, as I'm bogged down with so much to do.

Right now I'm responding to PMs on both Blood and Path, and trying to work my way through lair requests and similar. I'm nearly caught up on that.

After that I'll be catching up with Path and Blood bugs alike, which will take me a few more days.

Next week I'm putting the finishing touches on my board game ready for it to launch, so I won't be around too much.

After that I'll be simultaneously continuing the work on mastery powers, implementing the previous chapter's consequences, and working on a few minor improvements.

Within a month (of today) the next chapter will start. This will be by far the most important chapter so far. It's crunch time! All your decisions have come down to now. With vampiric secrecy very close to absolute collapse, and the sirens up to something deep down under the city, you'll have a choice to make which will see one of two absolutely massive consequences which will impact gameplay and the story to equal degrees. We're talking consequences for which there will be no going back.

Shortly after the next chapter begins I hope to roll out mastery powers. There will be one mastery power per path to begin with, and we'll build from there.

I'll also be working on an automatic gauntlet tournament system soon, which will be used for both Path and Blood. However, Path's tournaments will use the 'battle to the death' system for now, whereas Blood's tournaments will be live skirmish battles.

My other priorities for Path will be to implement features which make the game more attractive to roleplayers, primarily. There's a fair amount of confusion and misinformation surrounding this, but let me assure you that the vast majority of the gameplay and grid will be remaining as it is, so even if you dislike roleplaying you'll still have plenty of options to continue playing exactly as you always have. The largest changes to Path will be streamlining the battle systems down into one tactical system, which we're intending to make more inclusive and generally encourage roleplay instead of encouraging bad OOC feelings. However, the battle system changes won't be happening just yet. For now, I'll be making smaller updates such as improving the chat features to allow for better live roleplaying, among other things.

Thank you all for your patience, and sorry for a slow few months! Things will start speeding up as soon as I'm all caught up.

[Mooncalf]

Update on this: I'm hugely behind schedule right now, because of the unexpected number of bugs and fixes I've had to deal with / still have to deal with, and fulfilling lair requests has also slowed me down a bit.

For those of you who frequently offer to help: firstly, I love you. Secondly, if you could think of ways to keep people entertained and socialising while I'm playing catch up, I'm sure everyone will love you as much as I do. Things like chat parties, GMed roleplay threads, hunting parties, competitions, faction vs faction war, and so on. I very much appreciate the help, for those of you with time and energy to plan anything like that.

I'm working on Path and Blood 5 or 6 days a week right now, so it won't be long until I'm back on schedule with it. Thanks for your patience.