Hi everyone!

So, I've been much too quiet in the past... Year and a half? More?... And I know it's been frustrating waiting for the next update. I have all sorts of reasons why it hasn't happened as quickly as I wanted, but excuses don't matter much when you're waiting, and I apologise again for the wait and the lack of communication.

So, cutting to the chase, where's the update, when is it coming? Well, it's available right now! Woohoo!

This update adds 80 new spanking scenes, a new card game that I mentioned previously, and continues the story or our two heroines. On top of that, you will find some updated character art (mainly in the prologue), a reworked combat system with more options, more tracked stats, a dom/sub leaning system, more secrets, more awards... It's quite a lot, and I really hope you will enjoy it!

As always with these updates, I would recommend starting a playthrough from the start — there are new things to see in each chapter and sometimes using an old save create issues. I really hope you'll enjoy discovering what's new, what's changed, and where the story goes.

If you've never played before, amazing! Have fun!

You cannot imagine how excited and relieved I am to FINALLY get this chapter out. This has been the longest gestation and the most frustrating two-plus years. If you care about some of the reasons why it took so long, keep reading. If not, just go download it and enjoy! It's still free, and always will be (although donations are always welcome of course ;) )

So, why did it take so long? There's not one single reason, of course, but the main one was how frustrating I found working with the code in the way I had it set-up. Elven Kingdom was my very first Ren'py project, and my very first coding project in general, so a lot for it was built literally as I was learning. This means it was a mess, and very unwieldly. So, naively, I thought I would make big changes in the background to make it easier for myself. And it worked! But to get there, I had to basically redo most of the game, code-wise, and that took far, far longer than I thought it would. Every time I thought I'd done it, something crept up, and going through the whole game over and over is longer now that it was when it was just a chapter or two, of course! Note that I am still quite an incompetent coder, and by no means to I pretend that I'm building all of this from scratch (nothing praise for Ren'py from me), but the systems I had built (such as the rudimentary combat system) were really dragging me down. I was also very ineffective at how I dealt with various images and outfits, so I changed many of the images to work with variables. This meant more reworks, more testing, more wasted time.

The nice thing now is that the way things are done, the art also takes less time, as I need fewer versions now that most of it is controlled by code rather than having to create  10 variations. Outfit changes are a lot easier too, which opens the possibility of the player choosing their outfit in the future, for instance. Lots of ideas, but I'm really trying to learn from my mistakes and keep the scope creep in check.

Blah, blah, blah, what does it actually mean, Kalidwen? Well, it means that now, writing and coding is much faster, and it means that now, updates can be done at a much faster rate. There was only 6 months to a year between the prologue, chapter 1 and chapter 2, so hopefully that lends some credibility to what I'm saying here. I can be quick(er)! I wanted it to come out faster, and no-one was more frustrated than I was that it didn't, believe me.

So what's next? First, I did cut a few scenes here and there to get this Chapter out. Nothing major, of course, but it made the last bit of work a lot less stressful. So at the end August, there will be a mini-update that will add 15 new spanking scenes/unlockables throughout the game but not advance the story. The art is halfway done for all of these already, so I know it will be on schedule!

After that, the next chapter will come at the start of 2026, so just over 6 months from now. I have the story laid out and some of the art sketched out already, and I feel pretty good about it. 

Finally, can you trust me to communicate better? No, you shouldn't trust me until I actually do. So here's what I want to do: write a devlog on the first day of each month to report on progress. It's easy to keep track of, it's not too time consuming for me, and it should be reassuring for you to see it happen. Then, hopefully, there will be a little trust regained!

Until then, enjoy the update! Many thanks to all the people who have supported me along the way, and thank you all for your patience.

Love you all!

-Kalidwen

p.s.: I can never do one of these without some art, so here is an example of updated character art :) See you on the 1st!