Hi everyone! Welcome to another weekly devlog! As always, many thanks to the people who actually read these and offer comments and suggestions! The enthusiasm that people have shown for this little project of mine is 100% what has kept me going and motivates me to improve it as I go. So thanks!

Fittingly, a lot of time this week was spent in partnership with backers who were kind enough to claim the higher tier of rewards and therefore got to design a character for the game! It's always great fun to collaborate with different people, and it's been a blast including characters sprung from the mind of other people into the game in previous chapters. My hope is always that these characters fit well enough into the narrative that you can never be entirely sure if they were planned from the start! I think many of the most memorable characters in Stonehold were actually backer-created (I wonder if you could guess them all, hehe).

So far in this chapter, one of the backers has sparked an idea that pretty much entirely redefined my vision of how Dwarven society will be different from Elves and Humans, and if that's not just awesome, I don't know what is! That's what I love about working with others; the character is great and all, but it's in the discussions about the wider context of the narrative that great ideas also happen.

The other character I've been working on is a pretty cool looking bounty-huntress that I'm going to have a lot of fun getting inn trouble a lot, hehehe. When designing these characters, there is always a back-and-forth between me and the backer, and I think that they always come out the better for it ^^ That being said, no design is final, so you might see them slightly differently in the game!

As I was working on these characters I couldn't help but think of my great friend and talented artist Gesperax in that regard, who has a series of side stories set in the Elven Kingdom running on deviantArt. A lot of characters here and there in the games are nods and winks to friends of mine, and that has always been one of the joys of creating stuff for me. 

Anyway, in concrete terms, what has happened this week? Well, like I said, two new characters have now been added to the game, and I've finalised a few background pictures as well. I'm also happy to announce that the writing for this chapter is now at 10,500 words, crossing the 50% mark! Woohoo! Writing for me is an iterative process, which means I tend to go and lay the foundation of most scenes at the beginning of a project, and then go back over them to add to them progressively as I go. While it can be frustrating not to have entirely finished scenes as I'm working on the project, it also means that a lot of ideas that come to me later are very easy to graft onto the skeleton of writing that is already there. It also makes integrating new characters much easier, since it's a flexible setup.

The target for next week is to reach 15,000 words, and to finish the mage and queen cards for the mini-game.