It's Happening!

Hi everyone! I want to quickly thank everyone again for your support over these long years, and to make a announcement I'm excited about.

If you have been in the Discord or lurked around my Twitter much, you have probably already seen cryptic notes about a new project in the works. Indeed, it is official: I am working on a sequel to Daughter of Essence, though it will also be a standalone project not requiring prior knowledge to enjoy.

I don't want to spoil everything, but I did want to share some news and give people something to look forward to. Here's what I can tell you so far:

* This project is (unofficially) titled "Last Child of Essence," and it's set 150 years after where we left off.

* The story follows a boy called Ensi, the titular Child of Essence, though he does not live on the world as we know it. Ensi resides in the Dark Beyond the Dream, a pocket of drifting stone beyond space and time, and he moves around the world through the dreams and nightmares of its inhabitants.

* The game is still fundamentally a JRPG, though it will be quite a bit different from DoE, structurally. Rather than hyper-focusing on the customization of 1 unit, you will have dozens (potentially hundreds) of recruitable allies, each with their own assortment of stats, abilities and equipment. Some of these units will be randomly-generated in the style of Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics (though with much greater variance)--and many more of them will be unique units with stories and motives of their own. The strategy and customization will mostly boil down to finding unit combinations you enjoy and find success with, though there will be some build diversity within units as well.

* Last Child of Essence will conclude the "Essence" saga. If you played DoE, you will definitely want to see how it all ends.

* The game will contain mature themes, language and scenarios. I am not interested in making anything for young audiences.

* There is a canonical ending to Daughter of Essence that carries over into the new project. Mercy Albath's actions were and are not for nothing. I don't want to spoil it, though, so you'll just have to wait and see.

Here's what I can't tell you yet:

* Erotic Content: This being the dramatic conclusion of a story I've been thinking about for a long time, fully explicit sexual content is sort of optional. It doesn't feel essential to story I'm trying to tell, and part of me thinks it will feel like a cash grab if I include it, but we'll see what the demand is like. I don't want to alienate people who are interested in experiencing this story, but I don't want to disappoint fans of DoE either. It's a tough balance to strike. I need to think about it more.

* Funding: There will be a crowd-funding campaign at some point, for some amount of money. Unlike with DoE, I want to be able to go into this project with some portion of the budget to hire an artist and at least some of the voice actors secured ahead of time. Enough for a baseline level of content I want to be consistent and of good quality. But I'm still working out those numbers and talking with people, so more on that later.

* When: I don't know. When I feel like there's something here worth playing, I'll do something similar to DoE and put it into early access. Right now, I'm still in the early stages of development (about 5-6 months in), so it's mostly a lot of Math and design documents still. No one needs to see that.

That's all for now! I'll be posting updates as I make progress, but I'm also happy to answer questions on Twitter or Bluesky.

- Nym