Look, it’s a game development update!

As of this week, I’ve pretty much wrapped up development of the Beta 4.0 release of Legionwood 2, having completed all of the remaining content in Act II, and now all that remains is a couple of weeks of testing and some final polishing.

Beta 4.0 will feature some old friends…and some old enemies. (Fan art by Mythendary)

In the game’s current form, all of the new content is pretty much done and Beta 4.0 is completely playable from start to finish (and all up there’s ~3 hours or so of new content to look forward to) in a basic and unbalanced manner, and most of the new events and scripts are working fine. While I could theoretically release the beta now — and players would be able to get right up to the beginning of the game’s third act — I want to spend a few weeks to a month from now thoroughly testing and polishing this new content to make sure it’s all balanced and bug free upon release. I’ve contacted some of my old beta testers to help me with this, and they’ll be receiving Work-In-Progress builds of the game in the next few days, though there’s still a lot of work I want to do myself before I feel that the new content’s ready.

In particular, I want to make sure that all of the morality based content in the new release is working as intended, and I’m also going to do a quick sweep of the game to re-balance the morality system in general to make sure that the game’s choices and consequences aren’t heavily skewed to one side over the other. The new release is intended to have equally valid reasons to play through the game with either positive or negative morality, and the game’s plot reaches a huge turning point at the end of Act II with the death of one of two characters (determined by the player’s morality). Ultimately, the goal is for Legionwood 2 to have multiple possible endings and for the player’s choices in game to determine what the will (or won’t) encounter in their current playthrough.

I had originally intended to release the game some time this month. However, I’ve returned to university as of this week, which is making it hard to find the time to add all these last minute touches to the release. I’m doing my best to work on it whenever I can, but spare time is already becoming a rare commodity (especially since I’m juggling Legionwood and my writing projects, all at the same time, which really doesn’t do wonders for my social life). At the moment, I’d tentatively give mid to late April as a release estimate, though please don’t hold me to that. Basically, please stay patient. I’m doing the best I can to make sure that the next release is the best one yet, and I’m sure you’ll all be happy with it in the end.

More updates are to come closer to release. In the meantime, check out Beta 3.0 if you haven’t already — there just might be enough adventuring packed into it to keep you busy until I’m done.