sierralee
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Belated Weekly Update
🕑 Added 2024-06-29 17:00:22 +0000 UTCI'm in an extraordinarily good mood! It's not wise to get your happiness from external events, but gosh darn it if it isn't nice when things are going so well on multiple fronts. ^-^
Just for fun, Annikath made a "smash or pass" quiz with TLS characters. Check it out if you want to participate:
https://freeonlinesurveys.com/s/CneIQBy5
The Last Sovereign
Feedback from $1 backers is beginning to roll in. Though I still worry about the finer details behind the scenes and tweaking the final battle so it works best for everyone, it's great to see that so many people are enjoying the conclusion to many arcs of TLS!
I play a lot of games, so obviously I have personal opinions, and this is my best shot at a big climactic sequence that balances narrative and player choices. As I mentioned earlier, I was concerned about a ME3 issue, so I'm relieved that players have largely enjoyed the climax. Obviously I'll keep fixing bugs and polishing, but the core mechanics were built into months of work, so if people had rejected those, that would have been rough.
Instead I think the event managed to serve as the grand conclusion I wanted, both of all the work I've put into the characters, world, and mechanics over the years, and hopefully of everyone's intellectual and emotional investment into my little game.
As I spend less of my time on bug fixing and wrap up other work, I find myself increasingly eager to dive into the rest! More information on that is probably better suited to a later post, but there's still fun stuff in store. ^-^ I've spent this long on TLS and I absolutely want to finish everything right.
The Weirkey Chronicles
The normal pattern for book series is that the first book sells the most and each sequel sells less. Well, TWC has been doing the reverse: the first book didn't sell terribly well, but each subsequent book has done a little better. Of course the first book has still sold the most total, but new readers in between books have pushed the launches higher and higher.
Wakespire was an exception to that trend, which worried me, but now I'm inclined to attribute that to the different promotional methods I was trying. Deathseed has not just done better, it has blown past my previous records, peaking here on the Amazon rankings:
This might not be much to the big deal authors, but it's huge for me! Even though the competition only gets tougher from here, it no longer seems unfathomable that one day I'll have a book hit the top 100 on Amazon.
Of course, part of this success should be credited to the massive free sale, which gave out more than 34,000 free books. I managed to peak relatively high on the free charts as well:
Given that this promotion caused a measurable boost to Deathseed's sales, I may not be able to repeat this performance next book. Still, I feel encouraged that TWC is still showing strong interest and hope that people will be on board for everything I have planned in this series! Thank you so much for supporting me in all my creative projects. ^-^
A Word on Buses
Just before the book release, I made an ironic remark about hypothetically getting hit by a bus and received a considerable number of concerned comments and messages, so I wanted to circle back to that and urge people not to worry about me.
My health is overall pretty good. Take all the Surgeon General's recommendations on the stereotypical healthy habits (exercise, diet, sleep, dental, sunscreen, etc) and I do a pretty good job on them, as I've done for my entire life. However, given my disposition and pitch black humor, I've long joked that this guarantees that I'll die of something congenital or, the classic, get hit by a bus.
This is just a wry acknowledgement of the uncontrollable nature of life, not an expression of depression or self-abnegation or anything. Obviously I hope that I'll live to a ripe old age and be capable of doing what I love for decades to come!
I really feel extraordinarily fortunate to have the life I do. When we hit the ten year anniversary for TLS, I actually intend to post more in-depth thoughts about it, but that will come later in the year. In any case, I hope this has given a little insight and hopefully calmed any concerns. Thank you all for supporting me this far and giving me a career that is truly a great source of joy in my life!
Comments
Sierra Lee
Ah, that's a relic of the past. That used to be Vera's sprite, but she got an upgrade during development. Most of her sprites got changed over and that one was missed... until now, thanks!
Makesin
I have an entirely unrelated potential minor bug report. In Chapter 3, Govern 3 section (after Zirantia), in the ecumenical council in the Cathedral library, the Cult of Magic representative is probably wrong. She uses Vera's portrait and the text sounds like her too, but the sprite is different (in the scope of the Cult of Magic, it's the same one as the receptionist uses).
Sierra Lee
Glad to hear that you enjoyed the update, and of course I'm happy to get your thoughts. ^-^ I'm not sure what parts you're thinking of, but most of the character-focused events are highly dependent on your choices, so I hope you find it satisfying if you choose to look behind the curtain. And yes, this was definitely meant to be a celebration of the main cast, so I'm glad those sections seem to have hit for people.
Ark Tolei
As one of those 1$ backers who was finally able to get time to dig into the update last night, I think the finale felt pretty much perfect going into it blind. My world state definitely seemed to help me on several occasions, and I'm curious if I could have avoided some of the more tragic events if I had been a bit more aggressive earlier, or simply made better decisions generally, but I think I avoided the most obvious pitfalls. My ending stats were 24/6/7/12/6/10 going in blind with a fairly well spreadsheeted run that I ended up not using all my resources on prior to the battle (I simply forgot to use 5 shards and a million pron before starting it up). I don't know if that's useful information for you or not. I really enjoyed this update from top to bottom. None of the sections dragged at all, despite this being a fairly combat heavy update. It was very well paced throughout, and the need to continuously swap between so many teams really called attention to how good all the characters feel to play with. I felt like the section where you have 4 teams running together, and it automatically swapping between them every fight or two was particularly great. I'm curious to see how many variants there are on that part in particular, but I might actually wait until I've dug into the epilogue a bit before I sate that curiosity. I kind of like having no idea what's behind those curtains for now. Narratively I think you blew it out of the park, as usual. I enjoy how there's a degree of deadlock in the philosophy as the power creep gets so high that standard models of morality tend to start falling apart, and I think that the choices presented at the end were very satisfying ways for these characters to approach the problems of power. Great job as always, and congrats on finishing such a huge milestone!
