Court of Ashes Now Available

Hello, Councilors!

As this message is being written, Court of Ashes is building in the background before packaging and upload to Steam. With it, so too are our own sentiments building. Court of Ashes will be available to play at 6:00am CT.

The release of this game doesn’t mark the finish line for us, but rather a grand goalpost from which to proceed. There are innumerable features we’re interested in adding to the game post-release; a few animations, controller support, a number of scenarios, additional scenes, etc. The old quote, “Art is never finished, only abandoned”, sometimes attributed to da Vinci, sometimes Vasari, and sometimes even others certainly applies to this situation.

In short… we’re not done.

With that thought in mind, we are delivering what we set out to deliver:

• We offer five distinct characters, each with their own perspective of an overarching story.

• We set out to deliver 60 special scenes unlocked by affinity and actually created 79.

• We wanted around 250 scenarios and, through playtesting and balance, arrived at 238.

• We logged in around 189,000 words and 1.5million characters. This smashed our original goal to make 100k-130k (general novel-length) words of focused content.

Ultimately, what we set out to create was something that you would enjoy playing. Every component that went into Court of Ashes was scrutinized and debated, sometimes across many months. The game itself has gone through four playable iterations, each one marching towards the title which you will see today; a distillation of the good and a rejection of the bad.

In that spirit, there is nothing preventing us from creating a fifth iteration. If you find something which vexes you, we want to know. If there’s something you enjoy, we’d love to hear it. If you find a bug, and I’m afraid that with the legion of narrative branches and variables which shape the world of Court of Ashes there will be some, please let us know. This is our first game and we’ve delivered our very best up to this point… with your feedback will grow better still.

Thank you for all of your support up to this day. We really hope you enjoy what we’ve created. It is for you, after all.

Yours reverently, Chris & C.S. Cratel