Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut News

Hey folks!

It looks like the Steam Awards are coming up soon, so if you've enjoyed Slay the Princess, please consider nominating us for Outstanding Story Rich Game! Heck, nominate us for ~every (relevant) category~ if you want, because apparently you can do that this year!

Thank you again so much for making this launch such a wonderful experience — we really can't express how happy it's made us to see people enjoy Slay the Princess so much.

Best,
Tony and Abby

Hey folks!

Trading Cards, emotes, badges, and profile backgrounds are here! Hope you like 'em ^^

A big thanks to everyone who's shared their condolences for Abby's family this week. It's meant a lot to hear from you all, and we really appreciate all of you bearing with us while we get things sorted.

A few things coming down the pipe:

• We're still looking to find the rate date to reschedule the livestream for — but we'll let you know as soon as we have one.
  
• The Steam Awards nomination period is coming up at the start of the Fall Sale — we'll have a separate post for that when voting starts, but when the time comes, we'd appreciate your vote for Outstanding Story-Rich Game. Each player is only allowed to submit a game to a single category, so it helps if we all focus our efforts in just the one direction.
  
• We're finally running out of bugs to fix, which is nice! There's still a few bits where I'd like to improve the mix, but work there's been slowing down a bit.
  
• We've got a few accessibility fixes we'd like to make that are a little more complicated to implement, and still looking to make controller support less janky.
  
• Some other really cool stuff that isn't ready to be announced, but that we're comfortable teasing. Keep your eyes peeled in the new year!
  

[Update: Abby's dad unexpectedly passed the morning of the 9th, so we need to reschedule the stream for after the funeral. It will probably be in December now, but we'll let you know when we have a date. Thank you for understanding, ~Tony]

Hey everyone!

Mark your calendars, because we're doing a very special livestream on November 18th, starting at 11am Eastern time on our twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/black_tabby_games

We'll be doing a full, live playthrough of Slay the Princess with a twist: the voice sliders are going to be turned down to 0, and Jonny and Nichole are going to read all of their parts live. Brandon Boone, our composer, will also be there (but after talking about how much of a logistical nightmare it would be, there won't be live music.)

While we play, we'll be taking questions from the audience, talking about the development process, and maybe chatting a bit about what we've got planned for the future.

Hope to see you there!
~Tony and Abby

New patch went up, here's the quick summary.

Finally finally finally finally, the bit where you could get softlocked on chapter 1 should be fixed.

Remixed the audio for The Shifting Mound fight. She should no longer be louder than the rest of the game, and the audio quality for the in-game version of the transformation track should be significantly improved.

Various smaller bug fixes, including clipping issues with some sprites, a few other lines of audio getting loudness adjusted, and some typos.

The accessibility menu should now correctly be directly accessible from the main menu.

What's Next

Controller support could be a lot better. I think this is probably a longer-term project on my part. Ren'py is a little finicky and assumes choice menus will be wholly represented on the screen instead of presented in a scrolling box. I'm not sure the best way to immediately improve the feel of that scroll, but it's something I'm actively thinking about.

Sound mixing overall could still be better. I have a backlog from the pinned thread, but I wanted to make sure the worst offender, the Shifting Mound fight was addressed in the short-term. On that note:

Install space - right now, the game has a lot of uncompressed audio, since working directly with those raw files makes my ongoing efforts to tweak sound and gameplay issues much much faster. Once I'm confident everything's in a more settled state, will be converting voice files to flac to save space while preserving quality. We won't be compressing any of the visual assets in the game - want to make sure those remain as crisp as possible.

A few other accessibility fixes are on our roadmap as well. Ren'py's built in accessibility fonts scale directly to font-size in terms of points, which means that right now, if you switch to a different font, the Princess' text will appear much larger than any other text, and can occasionally run off the screen. I'm not sure what the best fix for that is just yet since we're just leaning directly on our engine for that functionality, but I'm hoping I can figure something out.

We've maybe been starting to think about some more fun things that aren't just fixes but for the time being 🤐

Drowned Grey should no longer accuse you of murdering her if she killed herself in the prior chapter.