Thus begins 2026, and the Year Of [strike]Trojan[/strike] The Horse! Whilst Ive been quiet over the festive period, that is not the same thing as being (entirely) idle. So lets have a look at everything that has been happening, and is about to happen.

\nStory

Our new years resolution is finish the main plotline; no seriously; do it. Over the last few months Ive been working with lead editor DoItToJulia and our new project manager Midnight Iris to slave our entire writing capacity to that end. Previously, Mattrex and I would work through the main plotline sequentially, while DoItToJulias writing team worked with us on the remainder - but that was vulnerable to sudden incapacity and logjams, as weve seen.\n

Ive been working with both to get the main plotline outlined in advance, parcelled, and absolutely everyone on it - which means we can write the whole thing simultaneously. Weve pulled in old hands and recruited new talent for the task, including John Drake. Thus far, this approach has yielded extremely good results, and we expect to be moving that waterline up very quickly over the next few months.\n

Art

This is another area of focus we want to get all of our art up to a common, final standard, in time for our main release. To that end, weve moved our splash artist Undoodle over from Permission To Dock to focus exclusively on new pieces for Ravager, and were inviting back Sintax Error to help with the remainder of our character art. For our scene art, were bringing in three(!) artists to do a turbo enhancement sweep on our older pieces - including Sommelier, who you may already be familiar with from their work on Seeds Of Chaos.\n

But thats not all! Im working with HereToHelp to get all of our sprites properly scaled and aligned, and with Amon Ra on getting the newest ones animated. Hes begun breathing movement into our new-look messy sprites, and what Ive seen so far looks amazing.\n

Sound

Our musician Exo Spectra has already done a fabulous job with our soundtrack and now hes turning his attention to the rest of Ravagers soundscape, going through scene by scene and adding environmental and action foley. The last update saw that applied to the start of Act I, and lots more is to come. And there will be enhancements to our music, too, as he finds places for alternate themes and variations.

Voice acting has been part of Ravagers signature from the very first build, and thats another area Im paying a lot of attention to. Weve brought in fresh cutters and engineers to help with our backlog of raw recordings, and Ive been running between our cast of voice talent to get them back into the recording booths. Where a character isnt yet cast, or the old voice talent is no longer available, Ive been finding new faces most notably, Fenrah Alesari will be taking over for our darling serpentine daughter.

Translation

The unreasonably vast size of Ravager about 1.3 million words, which is more than twice the length of Lord Of The Rings makes translation efforts difficult. Ive brought in Majaeste to assist Soulphase with coordinating our fan localisation teams, and supporting new translators. If you are bilingual, and would like to assist their efforts (in exchange for shiny benefits), please let us know in our Discord server .

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And thats (much of) what weve been up to! Given the nature of the internet, I expect some of you will be concerned that we are overworking ourselves and others convinced that we are doing nowhere near enough. The truth of the matter is that we are doing as much as we sustainably can, in the smartest manner we can come up with. The end is in sight... and were getting there, soon.