First siege battle in the game!

Sorry for the long radio silence. We've been working on something really big: fully working sieges with walls and gates. We also spent some time on Google trying to find a better term (the siege is technically what you do in order to avoid battle, and a real siege sounds pretty boring), but since most other games call storming-the-castle levels sieges, we will too.

You wouldn't believe how much we had to rework in order to get this all to work. Pathfinding through the gate, AI deciding whether to attack the gate or go around it, letting attacks target an obstacle instead of an enemy lance, changing the node from a gate to a regular node after destruction, and on and on.

But it's all working now!

We also completely redid Sunrise Gate Outpost, the first settlement you find in the Shadowlands. We're going to be doing a lot more work to some other old areas in order to make them more interesting and important to the plot.

We'd like to get your input on the battle for Sunrise Gate Outpost: Are there too many enemies? Do the walls' defensive and offensive bonuses seem right?

We wanted to make this first siege a little simple, but we'll throw in some more complicated sieges in later levels.

We're getting back to work now. We have some more cutscenes to script and important battles to set up. And we'll try fixing the worst of the bugs you come across. We're probably going to slow down on adding new features until the game's plot is finished. If we can just focus on completing the plot, we think we can have move out of Early Access in November.

Also, we may be implementing some price increases soon. We had an idea of how much we would like to charge for the game, and the Early Access price is lower than that in order to entice players to help us with an incomplete game. Now that we're rolling toward completion, we're going to start moving the price up to what we had originally planned. So if you had been on the fence about buying Himeko Sutori, you might want to pick it up now.

That's it for the news right now. We'll be back soon with more developments for you.