Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut News

Hey folks!

Now that we're back from an incredibly exciting PAX, I want to do a devlog about the new demo. To that end, here's a survey that'll help with the writeup (and that'll help us mathematically determine Best Girl): https://forms.gle/zCsktLotoEP16bbj7

Also, while you're here, a quick update on the past couple of weeks, as well as what's to come.

We've been floored by the overall reception to the new demo — not only has the community response been incredibly, warm, but Slay the Princess has been making the rounds across the press space.

Here's just a few highlights from the past couple of weeks:

• Kotaku - This Horror Time Loop Game Stole PAX
• Paste Magazine - The Best Games We Saw at PAX East 2023
• Destructoid - PAX: Slay the Princess is a twisting, creepy, captivating moral dilemma

Slay the Princess also won *two* best in show awards at PAX, which is absolutely wild.

So, what comes next? For the most part, it's just going to be putting our heads down and finishing the game. All of the major plot points for Slay the Princess have been outlined and ironed out, so now it's just a matter of putting them into the game, creating more art, and recording more lines. While it's too early to announce a specific release date, we're shooting for Q3 of this year, with making sure the game is out in time for spooky season being our driving force. And given the rate we've been working at, that timeline feels pretty reasonable to us!

We'll be keeping this page up to date as we make more progress, but if you'd like more frequent updates, you can find them by:

• Joining our Discord
  
• Subscribing to our mailing list
• Following us on Tumblr
• Joining the Slay the Princess subreddit
• Following us on Twitter

Thank you again for the incredibly warm support — we're so happy that you're all as excited about this game as we are!

Best,
Tony and Abby

Hey folks!

After much intense labor, the new Slay the Princess demo is here for you to enjoy! We made the first demo in just a couple of weeks to see what it'd be like to work on a game jam type project, so we wanted to take the opportunity to really expand on what was there and to release a more fleshed out version of it in line with the final vision.

This new demo features:

• New lines and scenes in Chapter 1
• 4 new Chapter 2 Princesses, bringing the grand total to 10.
• 10 new tracks of music.
• A massively expanded opening to Chapter 2.

All-in-all, there's probably about an hour or so of never-before-seen content in this update! If you happen to be attending PAX East this week, we'll be showcasing this new demo there as well, and there'll even be a standee of the Princess you can pose for pictures with!

There's 12 new achievements to find in the demo — since we overhauled the Chapter 2 experience for every Princess, we reset the "ending" based achievements, and there's a couple others to find as well.

Thanks so much for your continued support, and we can't wait to show you more!
~Tony and Abby

Hey folks!

Just in time for PAX East, we've got a new demo releasing on March 21st. You can think of this update as a sort of director's cut — the original demo for Slay the Princess was put together in a couple of weeks as a bit of an experiment to see what it would be like to work under game jam conditions. This new release is closer to our vision for the game, and features some reworked scenes in chapter 2, an expanded beginning to chapter 2, tons of new music, and four new Princesses to meet.

All-in-all, this update adds somewhere between 30 and 50% more content to what you've already played! On the off chance you're attending PAX this year, you'll be able to play the updated demo at our booth, but otherwise you'll be able to play it on Steam starting on the morning of the 21st. If you're extra impatient, though, you can play the test build right now by joining the alpha tester tier on our Patreon!

It's still too early to nail down a release date for the finished project, but everything's coming along pretty smoothly, and we can't wait to share even more with you!

Thank you as always for your patience and support, we wouldn't be able to make this game without you!
~Tony and Abby

Hey everyone!

Excited to share some pretty big development updates!

The first is that Slay the Princess was just selected to be part of this year's PAX Rising showcase, meaning we were one of just eleven indie games given a free booth for the convention. We'll be bringing a massively updated demo with us, including an expanded chapter 2, some more outcomes in chapter 1, and ~four~ new Princesses you've yet to meet.

And if you're not able to make it to PAX this year, no worries! The new demo will be going live on Steam at the start of the convention, so you'll still be able to play it as soon as everyone else from the comfort of your home.

On top of new content, we'll be pushing some QOL and UI changes to the demo as well.



The new textbox should feel more cohesive with the setting, and we're including a toggle-able quick menu at the bottom of the screen. I know some folks wound up going through the demo without realizing that they could save their games, so hopefully this saves new players a bit of a headache, and if you'd rather hide it, you'll be able to turn it off in the game's preferences.

We've also been working on a sticker sheet with chibi versions of all of the Chapter 2 Princess evolutions, including the ones you haven't met yet. Those'll be available for purchase alongside the new demo ^^



We're both very happy with how the script has been turning out, and can't wait to share more of the game with you. Thank you so much for your continued patience and support as we make our lil' game!

Best,
Tony and Abby

Hey folks!

We've finally finished Scarlet Hollow Episode 4, which means it's time to start thinking about what the rest of Slay the Princess' development is going to look like. A word on the former before we get to the latter.

For those of you not in the know, Scarlet Hollow is our other game, an episodic horror visual novel, currently on Episode 4 of our planned seven. It's a little different than Slay the Princess, but a lot of the same heart is there.

• It's choices matter horror game with a healthy dose of humor.
  
• All of the art is hand-illustrated by Abby Howard (who is also one of the co-creators and the illustrator for Slay the Princess.)
  
• It's a more grounded story, where you're investigating a series of paranormal events in a small town tied together by an unseen thread.
  
• The game is too expansive/complicated for us to add voice acting, so unlike Slay the Princess, you'll have to do some reading.
  

To celebrate Episode 4's release, Scarlet Hollow is currently 20% off, and players who own the game will get a special launch discount for Slay the Princess when it releases! So if that's the sort of thing that interests you, check it out ^^

Onto Slay the Princess and our overall development timeline.

Slay the Princess is our primary project at this point until it's finished. Some work is still going to be done on Scarlet Hollow in the meantime, but we've structured our workload so that both games can be written in parallel without slowing things down too much.

It's too early to say exactly when the finished version of Slay the Princess will be ready, but we're aiming for next summer, and given how quickly we were able to produce the demo, we feel pretty optimistic about that goal. That being said, we're a studio that always prioritizes quality over rushing games out the door, so that's subject to change. At least as things stand right now, though, Summer feels like more than enough time to tell the story we want to tell!

At some point before the full release, there'll be an updated version of the demo! Nothing too huge, but there's a few edits we'd like to make, and there's an interesting mechanic we had planned for the game that, timing-wise, just didn't make the cut for the original version of the demo, but that we'd like to share with you before you see the full game.

Thank you so much, as always, for the huge enthusiasm you've showered on our project! We're both so excited to put our heads down and share the rest of the story with you.

Best,
~Tony and Abby