V14 Update | The arrival of a new dev cycle and the end of Act 2— What can you expect?

Heyo!

It's been a couple of months since the last post on the dev blog! The holidays have come and gone, but things have been relatively quiet on our end since we stopped putting out the patches for V13.5, hasn't it? I completely understand people are looking forward to whatever we're putting on the table next, so I'll be using this post to explain a couple of things that have happened recently and what you can expect for this development cycle.

For the past two months or so, most of us have been on an extended break! Many of us either just needed time to take a breather after V13.5 came out (which, y'know... isn't that weird to want considering we had two very intense dev cycles that both lasted 2 years back-to-back), or had personal matters to attend to/deal with. For this reason, we haven't really made any significant progress on the next update. Jan's made a start on mapping some of the new areas shortly before going on break, but it's nothing that we're able to show here (yet). This actually ties into the main point of this whole post, which is about that V14 marks the end of Act 2. Development for it has slowly started to pick up again! This is super exciting, of course! We're all super stoked for you guys to see what this act will culminate in, and moving on to the final act of the game— Act 3.

However...

Due to the nature of the update, practically everything in this update is riddled with major spoilers— and as we want to keep as much as possible a surprise for players, it means that development updates this cycle will be far and few in between compared to the past couple of cycles.

This is a very conscious decision that we've made— and I know it may not be as fun for most people who are invested in the development process, but there really is just extremely little we can show that wouldn't outright spoil something major or indicate/imply something.

So will there just be... no posts? about development??? at all?????

That's not what I said, was it? There's just going to be less than usual! That being said, there's still a couple of things to look forward to during this dev cycle that I will personally be seeing to. I've got some characters lined up that will be getting their official art between now and V14's release, as well as the final artwork that I owe based on the 2020 popularity poll; the illustration I was going to make of Venam. I'll likely be posting this alongside the remaining character artwork somewhere in the near future. And of course there's still a chance we'll have proper dev posts from the team every once in a while! It's just entirely up to the discretion of Jan how much he wants to share or wants to be shared.

I'd imagine it's not a lot though... The team—but Jan and I in particular—have been looking forward to this highly important climactic update for a very, very long time, and we want it to be just as surprising and engaging as we've been planning for it to be.

That's all I can share for now, though. I'll leave you guys with the parting gift of a screenshot Jan shared on his twitter back in December for the people who missed it. In Jan's words, "it shows a lot but also nothing at all".

Enjoy, and wish us luck for this dev cycle! We hope you look forward to what we've got cooking!!

o7