gaming

Betrayed Alliance Release Year Announcement

Ryan J Slattery1 Comment

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.

April 2026 Betrayed Alliance Update

Ryan J Slattery2 Comments

What’s new in the last 2 months? Last update I showed off some work on new areas and battles. The last couple of months have seen a lot of work on systems and implementation of puzzles.

And as always new artwork, animations, etc. If I didn’t have any artwork, it would be hard to share anything at all! So let’s start with that.

New Artwork

Programming

Flags

I’ve not hidden the fact that I am quite an amateur when it comes to programming and get by on this project by the skin of my teeth. I spent the better part of a day on Spring break updating many of the global variables in the game into binary flags. This is something no one will ever notice, but it is more efficient and is something I really should have learned earlier, but somehow couldn’t wrap my head around. Despite my dumb-brain, I’ve finally took some time to learn about flags and have properly integrated them into the game. I’m hopeful this will save me parts of a kilobyte of memory. But as the saying goes (and is especially true in SCI0), every bit helps!

“Out of Heap Space”

Flags weren’t the only “under the hood” work I spent too much time on. I also discovered why the demo sometimes has the “out of heap space” error/bug. This has been something lurking in the back of my mind for some time, and I knew the day would come when I’d have to figure it out – and that day came when I couldn’t even walk around the game for more than 5 or so screens before it would crash. Somewhere, somehow, I had memory fragmentation and it had gotten critical!

After hours of searching on my own as well as puzzling it out with AI’s surprisingly bad rabbit trails, I discovered an anomaly that indicated what was wrong. Long story short, I had an in-room script running in many rooms that was only conditionally being set with the setScript: command. Apparently, without this, the script doesn’t get properly unloaded, causing subsequent memory fragmentation. With this discovery, a HUGE anxiety about memory management in the game has been lifted.

Speaking of programming, I learned a new trick while working on this room. I wanted the player to be able to interact with the weapons in the ground, but there are so many that I worried programming it would be a chore. Then I learned about the kernal call (GetDistance), which measures the distance between two points. Somehow I had never used this before?!

All I had to do in the end was set up a basic “for” loop, calculate the distance between ego and all the swords, keeping the nearest one and boom, no fuss, no multiple control colors, or ridiculous nested “ifs” or switch statements. So this update, I’m happy to announce I’m slowly becoming a slightly better programmer, despite the learning curve looking more like midwestern plain than the Colorado Rockies.

Krug

A bit more about the statue with the swords all around it. That is a statue of Krug, one of the three great apprentices. There is an item associated with him, and when designing it, I recalled a Magic The Gathering card from when I was younger called “Amulet of Kroog.” Since Krug is so similar to Kroog, I thought it would be a fun hommage to the card art by Margaret Organ-Kean to design the item after the artwork on the card.

Other small upgrades

If you’ve played the demo of Book 2, you know there is a place where the characters can pass items to each other. In that build, if you needed to give 4 items, you’d have to type each one individually. One change I’ve made is to reuse the inventory system (which its clickable items for descriptions) but instead of viewing the item, pass it to the other character. This way, it will be a bit less cumbersome if you have to pass a large handful of items at once!

As always, there’s always a lot more that is getting done under the hood, and many things I just don’t want to share because they are puzzles/spoilers. I always feel a tension in sharing too much or not enough, but the past few months were really quite productive and Spring break saw a LOT of time for development.

The last week of April will see a lull as I’ll be on a weeklong class trip, which is also why this update is a little earlier than usual. But after the trip comes exams, then we’ll be in summer, where I am ready to blast off on development like the Artemis II.

See you soon!

February Betrayed Alliance Update

Ryan J SlatteryLeave a comment

Where does the time go? Right behind us, apparently!

Well, it’s 2026 (and nearly March!), so how’s the seemingly endless work on Betrayed Alliance Book 2 going? Well, for anyone still following, let’s take a quick look!

Lots of under-the-hood programming, particularly regarding enemy encounters (and other encounters) in the “Forest Maze” area. To that end, I’ve also rigged up a couple of battle encounters – the first with an upgraded basic enemy with two knives, and the second, an ogre-like enemy with a club. A big thanks to Karl Dupéré-Richer for the enemy designs!

They were a lot of fun to animate. This also included programming some additional battle effects with special medallions the player can find in a few hidden corners.

Speaking of hidden areas, I also have been updating a few of those for the player to find.

In February, one focus was going through the background log and finding backgrounds that are still outstanding. In SCI Companion, it looks like this:

I then work on updating the scratch art. Every time I check out my list of needed backgrounds I think, wow, only about 20 left to do! Then, after I complete them, I think, hmm, with these done, now there’s only about 20 more to complete! Somehow, no matter how many backgrounds I complete, I also find more areas that need just a bit more expansion. Here are a few of the most recent backgrounds I’ve been working on:

As always, artwork is the easiest thing to show off, whereas a lot of the programming and systems implementation don’t shine through very much – not to mention cutscenes, dialog, and the like (I also don’t like showing everything to preserve a bit or mystery). It’s been a really good couple of months in terms of progress and I feel like I’m seeing the finish line. Maybe it’s just a mirage, but the final elements are starting to take shape and fall into place. Now it’s a matter of implementing the rest of the elements, tying up loose ends, then get this thing into beta testing. I will not yet dare to forecast dates, but…I’m feeling good!

In fact, from time to time, I also put in a little work on the interior of the Player’s Guide and Game Manual. There’s always something to do!