The demo for The Ruby Court has been out for a week now with over 500 plays! Pretty damn happy with that since I have an allergy to social media and actually… promoting stuff. If people are interested in seeing the analytics, I’m happy to share specifics.

BEEN WORKIN'

Work on RC this week has mostly been on content: writing, cleaning up art assets and all that. Two more of the sequences (see structure below) are done and ready for playtesting; and I’ve done some of the boring stuff like pause menus, making the Reputation meter actually work (fun fact: the one in the demo was just an animation, it wasn’t actually tracking anything).

Here are some of the shiny new portraits:

STRUCTURE

You know how sometimes you’ll know how something works in your head, so you completely forget to tell anyone else about it? Whoops.

So, RC is split into a series of sequences, that for the most part alternate between handing out the invites for the Court, and going on hunts to choose victims. Each sequence is going to give you chances to raise or lower your Reputation score, pick up trait points, and cause things that’ll get brought up later in the story. The goal (as Florence mentioned in the demo) is to have enough Reputation to get your own invite to the Court.

This’ll get explained in a much better way on the full game’s page/in a trailer if I put one together. For now, have this ugly flow:

Intro with Florence [DEMO] → First Invite → hunting → Second Invite → hunting → Third Invite → Status Update → ??? (I know but you don’t) → Reputation Gate → Court → Ending

RELEASE
Plan for release has always been late March, so I'm putting in March 28th as the official date.

ADD. NOTES

A UI issue concerning the dialogue text in the downloadable demo is being looked at (thanks for mentioning it, marmalade!). The issue has been fixed in the full-release project file, and I'll see if I have time to go back and update the demo versions.