books

Let’s set some things in stone! 2027 will be the year – targeting October

Betrayed Alliance Book 2 is coming in 2027?! That’s right, after years of development, I feel confident enough in the progress to risk announcing the game’s completion next year!

In the past 4 months I’ve been working hard to get the first 3/4s of the game in a “basically done” shape to prepare for playtesting, and I’m very close to that goal now. One thing that includes is finishing up some backgrounds that have “scratch” art.

As you can see, I have a basic image featuring a warrior with a sword, a farmer with a bushel of fruit, and an archer with a bow and arrow. The scratch art is simplistic and didn’t have much going for it in terms of composition (or anything else really). So I sketched out a scene with paper and pencil, then used it as a reference for the final in-game background.

A Few New Backgrounds

Here’s a few more newer backgrounds I’ve been working on since the last update.

In addition to creating the final artwork pieces (of which there are still about 12-15 to go), I also have been going through and updating the scoring system.

At the time of writing, there are 210 puzzle points currently implemented and tracked. I think the game will ultimately have around 250.

Looking for Help!

Once I get things generally ready, I’ll have a few people playtesting the game while I finish up the final act, fix some of the play testers’ findings, and get the game ready for October 2027. That gives me a little more than a year to finish the game, finish the player’s guide, and get it up and running on Steam.

I may need some help with the technical side of things (especially regarding Steam), but the adventure game community has always been able to help me when needed.

The game will feature well over 150 unique backgrounds, which should be enough for both characters to have a reasonably large explorable area. To compare with Book 1, that around three times the size, so I’m thinking this game will feel like a full game, whereas Book 1 likely felt a little short.

Free Game + Ways to support

Of course, the game will always be free, as advertised and promised since the Kickstarter something like 5 years ago (which boggles my mind!), but I am ramping up the manual + player’s guide to be even better than Book 1’s. So I hope when the game releases you will not only have fun with it, but support the work by getting the only physical element I can offer this release. It feature’s awesome artwork, a massive 7,500-word short story lore prequel to the setting and characters of the game, and perhaps even some secret tips and puzzles that interact with the game itself!

If you are able, the support I’ve had on Patreon has been a HUGE boon. I can promise so little (and I’m woefully behind on the comics!), but every little bit helps immensely.

Since the last update in July, I’ve had the honor on working on more background artwork pieces courtesy of sketches provided by Karl Dupere-Richer’s many sketches. Above are the colored versions That I completed and below you will see Karl’s sketches. I did my best to bring Karl’s wonderful drawings into the world of 16-color EGA vector art.

In August and September with the startup of school I took some time off the project to focus on getting my classroom up and running and working on establishing a new routine I could get comfortable with that would allow me time for my health/fitness goals.

At the tail end of September and now into October, I have started back on my daily work on the game. I am focused a lot on dialog creation and programming some puzzles of things I’d rather not show. With only a couple of months left in the 2025, I am a bit more doubtful of the full game being in alpha, as I need to update one particularly tricky puzzle area that got too big and convoluted and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Although it will take time to redo, it’ll be worth the work.

Ever heard of NaNoWriMo? It’s short for national novel writing month and people would try to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. While the organization shut down earlier this year, it’s still something I have participated in the past. I’ve never been able to complete the insane 50,000 words, but it’s always fun to work on. This year, I’m going to go a bit easy on it and try to write a 7,000 to 10,000 word short story that will serve as the backstory introduction for the physical manual this time around. Book 1 also had a short story introduction, too, but it was only about 1,500 words – a VERY short story indeed!

I used my old notebook from NaNoWriMo 2014 and wrote some story planning notes for next month. As you can see, I was always a big nerd, even 11 years ago! Also, while I didn’t “win” NaNoWriMo, I did eventually finish the 2014 story and publish the work in April 2016. My slow work pace is also, it seems, a continuing facet of my personality! I hope to give you a sneak peak of some of the writing at year’s end!

Also, for the blessed and honored Patreon folks, who have supported me in this project, I will be sending out the greeting card very soon! I am saddened to say that while I themed it for Halloween and will get them in the mail this week, it’s looking less likely that they’ll get there before the day itself.

If you would also like to get a greeting card with a few kindly words in it, feel free to join also! These are the people who make it possible to work on a niche project like this!

I hope you look forward to the future update and I’m excited for what I hope to finish in Betrayed Alliance for 2026. But I don’t want to focus too much on the future, but on working on what’s in front of me now.