State Of The Realm: January

Thus begins 2026, and the Year Of Trojan The Horse! Whilst I’ve been quiet over the festive period, that is not the same thing as being (entirely) idle. So let’s have a look at everything that has been happening, and is about to happen.

Our new year’s resolution is “finish the main plotline; no seriously; do it”. Over the last few months I’ve been working with lead editor DoItToJulia and our new project manager Midnight Iris to slave our entire writing capacity to that end. Previously, Mattrex and I would work through the main plotline sequentially, while DoItToJulia’s writing team worked with us on the remainder - but that was vulnerable to sudden incapacity and logjams, as we’ve seen.

I’ve been working with both to get the main plotline outlined in advance, parcelled, and absolutely everyone on it - which means we can write the whole thing simultaneously. We’ve pulled in old hands and recruited new talent for the task, including John Drake. Thus far, this approach has yielded extremely good results, and we expect to be moving that waterline up very quickly over the next few months.

This is another area of focus – we want to get all of our art up to a common, final standard, in time for our main release. To that end, we’ve moved our splash artist Undoodle over from Permission To Dock to focus exclusively on new pieces for Ravager, and we’re inviting back Sintax Error to help with the remainder of our character art. For our scene art, we’re bringing in three(!) artists to do a turbo enhancement sweep on our older pieces - including Sommelier, who you may already be familiar with from their work on Seeds Of Chaos.

But that’s not all! I’m working with HereToHelp to get all of our sprites properly scaled and aligned, and with Amon Ra on getting the newest ones animated. He’s begun breathing movement into our new-look “messy” sprites, and what I’ve seen so far looks amazing.

Our musician Exo Spectra has already done a fabulous job with our soundtrack – and now he’s turning his attention to the rest of Ravager’s soundscape, going through scene by scene and adding environmental and action foley. The last update saw that applied to the start of Act I, and lots more is to come. And there will be enhancements to our music, too, as he finds places for alternate themes and variations.

Voice acting has been part of Ravager’s signature from the very first build, and that’s another area I’m paying a lot of attention to. We’ve brought in fresh cutters and engineers to help with our backlog of raw recordings, and I’ve been running between our cast of voice talent to get them back into the recording booths. Where a character isn’t yet cast, or the old voice talent is no longer available, I’ve been finding new faces – most notably, Fenrah Alesari will be taking over for our darling serpentine daughter.

The unreasonably vast size of Ravager – about 1.3 million words, which is more than twice the length of Lord Of The Rings – makes translation efforts difficult. I’ve brought in Majaeste to assist Soulphase with coordinating our fan localisation teams, and supporting new translators. If you are bilingual, and would like to assist their efforts (in exchange for shiny benefits), please let us know in our Discord server[discord.gg].

And that’s (much of) what we’ve been up to! Given the nature of the internet, I expect some of you will be concerned that we are overworking ourselves – and others convinced that we are doing nowhere near enough. The truth of the matter is that we are doing as much as we sustainably can, in the smartest manner we can come up with. The end is in sight... and we’re getting there, soon.