Good day, everypony ! ! !

We hoped you enjoyed our first ever chapter on The Banished, hooray! Thank you for the support! We’re having a really fun time finally putting this story together through a medium that’s entertaining enough for everyone to do. Even though we had to do additional research and lessons on coding specifically. We underestimated how much we had to code…

Although, it’s slowly becoming much easier with enough time and patience (and with a very helpful hand from one of our members, they’re practically carrying us!). We foresee the future chapters will become more and more convoluted as the story goes, so we will take more additional lessons for that too. This project is practically our experiment when it comes to video game coding! So we also foresee future updates on bugs too, so don’t worry about that.

We’re already working on the next few chapters, with our team members reviewing the story script (which we made sure was actually worked on first, because of how lengthy the actual story is—oops spoilers!). Additional sprites and backgrounds are being added, as well as some fun little mini games. We’re some of those people who can get pretty bored with just reading in visual novels, so we decided to add some mini-games as well!

Here’s some work-in-progress screenshots from one of our artists! The first one depicts a connect-pipe-puzzle type mini game with Archi. Wonder where that comes in. The second one shows Nomad and Tricks playing chess!

Then, we move to the next.

There’s already some parts in certain chapters that are already finished and need some polishing. They were easy to work on as they’re just lines of dialogue, much like how Chapter 1 mostly was: lines and lines of dialogue… (did you enjoy those little mini games though? We like the part where Tricks actually had to clean the badges…)

With how easy the coding is coming along, we’re also coming back to the older codes we have from Chapter 1 and polishing them as well, so the next time you play the game, not only will you have a bug-free game, but also an additional chapter! We’re also deciding if we should stick with uploading one chapter per upload, or do a group upload with like 2-3 chapters. We’ll have to consult this with you players as well.

For now, we will be showing you two work-in-progress scenes from a chapter, featuring the main trio. You will be seeing more characters soon, based on our story script, but you just have to get used to seeing these three faces.

The first one shows a little dialogue segment between Tricks and Archi. Wonder what Tricks lost… Poor guy… (Archi seems kind of mad though, it must be something important). The second one shows Nomad with their little journal. What are they talking about…

And finally...

That is all we have to show for this status update! We will be showing other updates and work-in-progress shots soon when we can. For now, please enjoy and take in the first ever chapter of “The Banished”. It already has a lot of stuff hidden in it, little secrets to find. We hope you enjoy picking it apart.

Regards, The Terrible Boss.