Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut News

Hiya Killers!

We're nearing the home-stretch of Scarlet Hollow Episode 4's development, so we figured it'd be high time to announce a release date and share a new trailer. Once this episode's out, we'll be revving up for more work on Slay the Princess, but in the meantime, there's plenty of content in the Holler for you to sink your teeth into!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Episode 4 is set to release on November 22nd. I feel like we say this every time there's a new release, but it's also a long one. The full script for the episode is around 800 pages and somewhere around 200,000-250,000 words, bringing the total length of the game past One (1) Lord of the Rings or One (1) Infinite Jest in total content. Episode 4 has a lot of opportunities to revisit the consequences of earlier decisions, as well as even more new mysteries to unravel! And things are going to start to really steam up for certain romance paths.

We're extremely proud of how Episode 4 is turning out, and we can't wait to share the full chapter with you next month!

A few other notes:

• The game is currently on sale for Steam Scream Fest! If you haven't had the chance to pick up a copy, now's a great time! Scarlet Hollow is never going to dip below 20% off before leaving early access, and there's going to be a price hike before the full release, so if you've been holding out for a steeper discount, this is as steep as it'll get for at least a couple of years!
  
• If you want to get your hands on part of Episode 4 early, test branches available for Alpha Tester Patrons. A chunk of Episode 4 is available there now, and there'll be an update to the build later this week that brings things up to ~Episode 3's length content-wise.
  
• We have an ongoing crowd-funding campaign for a Wayne plush with glow in the dark eyes. There's ~two weeks left in the campaign as of the time of this writing, so please check it out if that sort of thing interests you!
  

Thanks again for all of your support, and we can wait to share more details for both Scarlet Hollow and Slay the Princess!
~Tony and Abby

Just an event to let us broadcast to our store page

Ongoing event to allow us to loop developers stream during Next Fest.

Hey everyone!

Slay the Princess is going to be taking part in Steam Next Fest starting on Monday, and we wanted to celebrate by putting together a new trailer and teasing more art for the full release!

Check it out here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The trailer.


The Fury.


The Nightmare.


The Beast.

In preparation for Next Fest, we've also spent the past couple of days working with the talented folks at Team Dogpit to put together a shader to handle Slay the Princess' animations on the GPU, rather than pre-rendering them as video files. The result should be a massive jump in performance on most machines.

We're still keeping the animation toggle as an option in the preferences, in case players would prefer an animation-free experience.

On top of dramatically improving performance, this update should significantly speed up development of the full game, since we no longer have to manually render each art asset; reduce file size, since all of our art assets can be stored as pngs; and allow for a faster turnaround on bug fixes. There's also a handful of compression artifacts that should no longer be present, specifically with a couple of more detailed assets losing some color information.

We have two streams planned for Next Fest – on October 3rd at 8pm EST, and on October 4th and 11pm EST. We'll be joined by Nichole Goodnight, the Princess' VA, and will be playing through the demo and taking your questions!

If you'd like to help us reach even more Heroes before Next Fest, replaying the demo and sharing the game over the next two days can go a long way for extra visibility!

Thanks so much!
Tony and Abby

Join us for a special developer live-stream as part of Steam Next Fest.