SLARPG: General update July 2022

Hello everyone! Last month, Super Lesbian Animal RPG reached Alpha. After seven years, the whole story was finally playable from start to finish. Now, at the tail end of July, I've slowly started to send this early build off to friends for playtesting and feedback. Before that, though, there were a few last things to take care of!

On Bee's end, this meant fine tuning the entire soundtrack, getting (almost) every song in the game's massive 80+ track OST in near-final shape. Everything's sounding that little bit more clear and professional, while some specific tracks got some more significant updates. I continue to be truly astounded by how good it all sounds - and in fact, if you want a preview, Bee's posted a new battle track for the first time in quite a while! You can give that a listen over here on Twitter or on Tumblr. I really love this one, and I think comparing it to the tracks heard in the demo will give you a small taste of just how stylistically broad the full game's music is. (Also, if you didn't know: almost every major area in the game has its own unique battle theme. Wow!!)

Meanwhile, as Bee worked on getting the music ready for the private Alpha, I worked on miscellaneous things to make the game a little more complete for playtesters. The most significant of which is that the game now has a fully functional Bestiary system!

Yes, I went through and created Bestiary entries for every single enemy in the game, wrote notes for all of them from Greenridge's local librarian Mona (with additional commentary sometimes added by the party), and made it so that they can be earned throughout the game. After the system is unlocked early on, enemies will begin dropping Bestiary entries upon defeat, which in turn unlocks their entries for viewing at any time in the Quest Log.

After receiving the music from Bee, I was also finally able to do the first ever start to finish playthrough of the entire game. I'm extremely pleased with how that went! With only one exception, I found no major issues, just a lot of tiny things like punctuation errors and balance hiccups. And, like I said up top, I'm now beginning to send the game to a few people so they can playtest it themselves. That will continue into August, as I don't expect my friends to set everything aside so they can complete a 10-15 hour playthrough of my game in one day.

Admittedly, while this was an eventful month, I've definitely felt myself slowing down after finally finishing the story. I think the exhaustion of the last year and a half of work is finally catching up to me now that I've crested that hill. As such, I've adjusted my expectations for when the game will release just a tad, just to make sure I don't drive myself fucking crazy trying to finish, promote, and release this game in a short span of time. We aren't quite as close as I hoped we'd be by the end of July, but we're getting pretty darn close. The "Alpha" I'm sending to friends is already extremely polished and presentable, and all systems are go for a release before the end of the year. (Hopefully sooner rather than later!)

And that wraps up another update! As always, thank you for your continued support, and stay safe out there. We can't wait to get this game into more peoples' hands.