Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut News

Tiny Teams: Year 2!

Hey folks!

We had the incredible good fortune of getting to debut Slay the Princess at last year's https://store.steampowered.com/sale/tinyteamsfestival2023]Tiny Teams festival on Steam, and as Slay the Princess nears the end of its development, we're coming full circle and participating once more.

For those of you not in the know, Tiny Teams is an annual festival hosted by the good folks over at The Yogscast as a celebration of games developed by studios with a core team of five or less developers. Slay the Princess' core team is just the two of us, (Tony and Abby), though we wouldn't be where we are without the phenomenal contributions of:

Brandon Boone (Music)
Nichole Goodnight (The Princess)
Jonathan Sims (The voices in your head)
Phil Michalski (Sound design)

This has been one of those projects that's pushed everyone involved to their absolute limits, and we can't wait for you to see what we've been cooking.

You can check out the full event here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/tinyteamsfestival2023

A brief update on the general state of development:

Art for both the Tower and Adversary is finished. In case you missed it yesterday, we shared another small preview of some of the many, many pieces of art you'll see in the latter's final release. Those two routes combined have about as much unique art in them as the entire demo.
We've also finished all of the writing for: Adversary, Tower, Spectre, Nightmare, Stranger, Witch (as well as quite a bit of other content we're not gonna talk about.) We've also finished work on hopefully the last trailer we'll ever have to do for the game.

The script is a little over 100,000 words right now, and the final game should probably clock in at ~120,000. For comparison, the first demo had ~16,000 words of content, and the second demo had ~36,000 words.
Brandon's also been knocking it out of the park with the soundtrack, and we've brought in Amelia Jones (who did vocals on the Hollow Knight OST) to help round out a couple of particularly important tracks, and her contributions have been stunning.

Enjoy some art of the adversary!

As we get closer to release, we'll start posting more behind-the-scenes updates to our Patreon, so if you're dying for an earlier look and want to support our studio in the most cost-efficient way possible, that's the best way to do both of those things! https://www.patreon.com/abbyhoward

And if you haven't yet, our Discord's the best place to get frequent updates and we also have a newsletter we email a little less than once a month.

Discord: discord.gg/blacktabbygames
Newsletter: bit.ly/blacktabbynews

Thanks so much for your support, and keep your eyes peeled for ~an announcement~ on September 6th.

Best,
Tony and Abby

Slay the Princess is coming to Fear Fest!

Hey folks!

Short, but exciting update here. Work on Slay the Princess is continuing to stay on schedule. At the time of this posting around half of the routes for the game are fully written, and we're on track to have the rest of the script done by late July/early August.

We've also got a few exciting events coming up on the calendar, including an exclusive new trailer and announcement as part of Fear Fest on September 6th — a celebration of horror games put together by Feardemic and hosted by IGN. You'll be able to catch the whole event on IGN's youtube channel.

It should be a great time, and we hope you tune in!

Until then, be sure to join our discord (discord.gg/blacktabbygames) or follow us on social media to keep up to date on the game's development.

Best,
Tony and Abby

Art Stream and Live Q&A!

Hey folks!

As part of our exhibition at this year's LudoNarraCon, we're going to do an art stream this Saturday, May 6th at 1pm Eastern time and taking your questions!

5/1 Small Patch

Tweaked the on-ramps to the Beast and Witch routes, making it easier to attain the Beast and more difficult to attain the Witch. Should be a good balance now where people struggle less w/ the beast specifically (and witch should remain very accessible!)

Additionally fixed a couple of small typos/errors

Survey for the new Slay the Princess demo + more to come!

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:

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:

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