May Results. Second Chapter Expansion announcement

Hi folks! 

May marks the first release of our new project, Luna in the Tavern: Animated. And you all clearly liked it! We did our best to make the wait worth it: we improved the text, the scenes, the engine, we did everything to make gameplay and watching animations comfortable. If you’ve encountered a bug or have any suggestions or feedback, message us through email, the in-game window or on Discord. We always welcome your feedback and have already fixed multiple errors, big and small, over the month. 

The next update for Animated will come out very soon. We see that there’s a good deal of interest in WIP videos about working on animation – we will keep sharing those with you! The new update features five endings. Almost all of them were practically completely rewritten, but the endings with Luna sleeping in the stables and Luna with the guys at the bar counter got special attention. We’ll leave the full story about those for the release post, though. It’s coming soon. 

It’s time to remember and talk about some plans we’ve mentioned a long time ago, but stopped sharing any news about after a certain point, or even mentioning the topic! It’s time to talk about the remake of Windranger’s Wanderings, which was announced several years ago but never got to release. 

Initially, we were going to create a roguelike with a combat/battlefuck focus, with the plot following my first RPGMaker games about Lyralei’s adventures. It sounded like a great idea, and we decided to take it on as a side project. We quickly adapted the plot, came up with some unique quests and drew the art, but got stuck developing the actual combat and battlefuck systems. Our lack of experience in those made itself known, and it became obvious that developing those systems requires a lot more time than we initially estimated – that would delay the development of the main game. After a certain amount of already prepared content ran out, we had to make a decision – either take the new game seriously and dedicate all of our energy to designing and playtesting it, or develop Luna in the Tavern, which is what most of our patrons even come here for. We decided not to spread ourselves thin and focused on new features for the main project, like adding more scenes for Act 3, or two heroines for Act 4 and the ability to walk around the tavern. 

(A working prototype of the combat system with battlefuck cards)

We didn’t just wash our hands of all the work we had done, and came back to the idea from time to time. We even got other people involved and “rebooted” the development, but coincidentally, we also got the chance to work with DJCompass at the same time (which I had wanted to do for a long time) to create another visual novel. The choice we made then led to the creation of Luna: Dirty Deeds. 

Game development is always a compromise of resource allocation. Instead of the WW remake we created multiple other projects that did see the light: Luna: Dirty Deeds, Luna Animated, and Luna in the Tavern itself ended up much bigger than we initially intended. But besides that, there’s another question I want to highlight. 

We often hear requests to publish our games on Steam. We’d like to do that very much, but it’s impossible. You can’t publish on Steam if your game uses someone else’s IP – Dota in our case. The WW remake would have never been published on Steam. 

We decided that it’s very important to publish all the content we made for the game that our patrons have been waiting for so eagerly (thank you to the patron who asked us about this!). Recently, we put it all in one pile and looked over all the content we’d made again, like the scene artwork. And so, we’d like to announce an Expansion of Act 2 of Luna in the Tavern! Yes, the episode dedicated to my favorite ginger will receive a large amount of content in the form of an alternative story branch to the main route, and we will use the art and sketches from the WW remake as the base. 

Have you considered what would’ve happened if Luna didn’t allow Goodkind and Lyralei to publish the porn novel featuring her? We’re going to answer that question! Featuring a new version of the “Never have I ever…” game where Luna’s going to ask questions and Lyralei will decide if she’s going to drink, this expansion will come with at least 8 Lyralei scenes left untold in the main plot. We had initially created them for the remake, but this will be their new debut!

This is our first time coming back to a finished chapter to add more scenes, so we’re very curious to see how we do and what you think of it. I really enjoyed working on Windranger, to be honest, so I’m also quite enthusiastic to make these new scenes – even though some of the art is already done, we need to expand the script and the code. We’re already working on it, though.

And so, the animation work continues, and there shall be more Lyralei scenes. As you can see, none of our efforts were wasted. And thanks to your support, we continue to create new stories!