Chapter 6 Status Report

Internal company memorandum re: next private build of research materials.

Chapter six is coming along slowly but surely.  This chapter is all about one of our most useful specimens, the Dinoians.  It would be nearly impossible to travel the vast desert wastelands without the use of our scaly, saurian mounts.  Any researcher traveling to the underground R&D facility has undoubtedly ridden one.

Researchers should be particularly careful when handling any Dinoian bindings.  Although SkyCorp Global is generally able to engineer the environment of their extended workforce so as to prevent them from shifting in form once assigned to a particular location, Dinoians naturally have to cover large tracts of land during their duties.  To ensure they stay in their intended form, their bindings are specially designed to be almost impossible to remove.  The special collars, cuffs, bands, and saddle will self-replicate across the subject as needed.

Occasionally, a subject forgets their employment agreement and attempts an unauthorized transformation.  Even if they manage to remove one binding, the other bindings will automatically replace it within moments.  This safety precaution helps prevent riders from getting stranded in the vast desert wasteland.  However, more than one careless researcher has found themselves with new duties after improperly handling the bindings.

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Vis-à-vis status of chapter six: most of the introductory scenes are written.  In terms of size, this chapter is on track to be huge.  Just the introductory scenes are almost as many words as some previous entire chapters.  The desert area has so many rooms, the map system has to be updated to efficiently render such a quantity.  So it will still be a while yet until chapter 6 is playable, but it will be worth the wait.

If you were watching blog comments, you may have noticed I changed the name of these guys from ‘Lizlands’ to ‘Dinoians.’  May change them again as I feel out the best name for them.

To researcher Hido’s inquiry about Patreon (as well as a couple others who have written in about PayPal support via Patreon), I have a work in progress preview page set up here.  The exact rewards are still TBD, but the primary one is Private Builds, which is the same one-time cost as it is at BMT.  Also brainstorming potential recurring rewards, including automatic unstable dev builds.  However, since pre-release dev builds are by their nature broken, incomplete, and otherwise not of playable quality, I may scratch that idea entirely (if they were actually ready for release, I’d just post it as a private build).  There’s some more details on how those builds would work on the preview page.  Leave a comment if you have other reward ideas (or are an existing backer who is vehemently against the idea of a Patreon for this project — it’s still only an idea at this phase).