Shackles of Ellswyn | March Update [Huge Route Overhaul]

This is kind of a big update from us this time around. The main new content is the completion of the Malathea scene, our newest character, who is going to play into the plot a bit more later on. We've also added several animations of existing beloved content, and have plans to continue adding more in the next few updates. The biggest news however is a few overhauls we've accomplished behind the scenes.

We've completed a major overhaul of the routing of the game. The picture is intentionally low rez so you can't read the cards, but can get an idea of what we're dealing with. The line of blue cards at the right are the specific types of endings. There's a seperate ending for if you are transformed or not for each character, as well as a few side content endings. Grey boxes represent a current route ending where it bounces to the end credits, this number has been drastically reduced due to the rerouting, and several routes now converge into other plotlines as intended, the routes that do end are because it's part of scenes that are to be continued, and potentially have another route meet at that point to do so. (For example we're waiting on some other plot lines to catch up before doing more Vella content) Also the distance between boxes, or number of nodes is not representation of how much content is in there, there's a few really long scenes that don't have any choices or routing in them, but this graph was just specifically for mapping out the players routes in the game, not the content included.

You can also see that there's one particular part of the game that's leaps ahead of the other content, which is the Princess route, which follows onto Tim's content. That's really only because we spent so long working on that one route to keep the flow going, and will be plugging other routes in along there eventually.

Each of the coloured boxes somewhat matches their in-game counterpart, Orange being the Witch (red was unreadable), Gold for the Queen, and Teal for Jane. There's a new pink box, which is for your BFF who now has their own route and endings, a thing we previously hadn't considered. No spoilers as to the content within just yet. The black boxes are for Vella, and Malathea doesn't have any, and unsure if she will have any unless she becomes a fan favourite and we make more scenes for her rather than just the plot ones we've got outlined.

We'ved also adding this tutorial screen at the beginning of the game to explain how the text boxes should keep you on your route. This was something we've always assumed you would figure out from just playing the game, but as the routes get more complex, it can't hurt to make sure people understand.

Last thing, we've also removed the need for the Password to access the BishoujoMom cosplay content, as we get further away from the original release it gets harder to dig up the posts and announcements, so we've just made it so that you'll unlock the images as you progress through the game.

All this to say we are taking the development of Shackles of Ellswyn very seriously, and are doing our best to improve the game that you love, so that you can continue to enjoy these characters and stories as we continue to write them.