Dev diary #20

Ahoy, pirates and pirate queens!

Hold the helm tight - our development ship is back on the air with a long-awaited dev diary! It’s been a while since we’ve had a good fireside chat, but we haven’t disappeared. We’ve been weathering storms, battling animation krakens, and charting a course toward the most important point on the map. And yes, we've been lazy too, of course.

Where are we now? The final frontier!
The main character has left the Podwodje, and now before them lies the first part of the final, fifth chapter. This is the "final frontier" we’ve been steering this story toward all these years. The entire plot is fully written, and the work plan is mapped out in detail down to the very last dot. We’re on the home stretch (which will last about a year).

We had planned to release an update back in December, but couldn’t - due to animation delays. Out of 7 key animations, only 4 are ready. To put it gently but honestly: at our current pace, we likely won’t make it by the end of January either. But we’ll still push hard, because we know all too well what a long delay between updates looks like for players.

There are many reasons (and they’re boring), but the main takeaway is this: to move faster, we’ll have to start outsourcing some NSFW scenes much earlier, working on them in parallel with other tasks. We know that long waits dampen interest - and honestly, that stings. But for now, unfortunately, we can’t go any faster. We’ll keep moving forward, inch by inch, to finish the main story.

While preparing the update, we haven’t been idle:

• Fixed a ton of bugs and inconsistencies in past content (from logic to punctuation and spelling). Older locations are now more stable.

• Tweaked some visual glitches (in the flood scene, Fabian was shirtless in both choices - now he’s wearing one in one of the variants).

• Spent a lot of time reflecting and decided we’ll slightly improve some of the existing side quests in the future (because the new ones promise to be better - skills grow over time). We’ll especially flesh out Lauren’s quest and the heroine herself.

• Simultaneously exploring options for translating the game into other languages - this will become a real task after the main story is complete.

• Plans are brewing for "post-finale goodies": soundtrack packs, source images, maybe even a digital artbook for you. We dream of DLC too, but that’s strictly after the main story. The crew’s energy has dwindled over the years, and we need to set priorities right.

Alright, enough talk. Here’s what we wanted to show you. Some of this you’ve already seen in minor news, but some is brand new. Of course, some images may contain spoilers, so if that matters to you - consider yourselves warned.

This is a map for a small minigame awaiting you ahead. A sort of fort, hand-drawn by one of the team members to plan something out.

Another lady appears on the ship. Now integrated into the background.

An important artifact or just another inventory item.

A sketch of an already finished image (we don’t want to show it yet so you can see everything in-game). You can guess from the silhouettes what’s happening here.

Princess Marta and her new outfit. It’s actually lingerie. We wanted to come up with something special for each character, but so far the story doesn’t have scenes for that, and only she will appear before you like this. (For now).

And lastly, the most important thing. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who still believes in this long voyage. To everyone who supports us with a kind word in the comments, a coin to back the project, or simply by recommending the game to a friend. You are our tailwind - without you, this ship would have run aground long ago.

Hold fast, pirates. The (good) end is near. We’ll do everything to make it worth it.

Your dev team, Likho Games.