It is time for another update from our team at Black Garden Studios to keep you informed and up to date with all going-ons in Necrofugitive development.

In the art department, our team has expanded our ranks and recruited an additional artist to help produce the necessary animations to get our cast of NPCs out the door. The first characters this artist has been working on can be seen in the next section below.

As you all know, in Necrofugitive, players can assimilate and then disguise themselves as various NPCs in the game. These NPCs enable the player to move around undetected and use enemy abilities to make their great escape. We have two NPCs we'd like to talk about in this update, both of which have been worked on by our new artist and art lead in tandem. First up is the Avencian Peasant.

This Avencian Peasant is a lowly serf who makes a meager living working the land. Equipped with a pitch fork, he is capable of fighting back, but is more often than not going to be terrified of the things happening around him. Most families see their sons conscripted to fight in the Avencian military, so peasants in particular tend to occupy the lowest caste in Avencian culture in terms of influence and authority. Theirs is a critical role all the same. Maintaining the food supply to keep the army fed is among their chief responsibilities, often enabling the otherwise able-bodied to be exempt from military service during times of lean.

The next new unit we want to introduce is the Avencian Sergeant. This high ranking soldier commands no small amount of authority in the field, often appointed as the local commanding officer in deployment zones and other critical military installations. Trained to battle with the best of them, the Sergeant is a capable warrior whose sword-fighting techniques are rooted in the traditional schools of swordplay found among Eldergrove's famed mercenary companies. Avencian Captains who survive long enough to attain promotion and distinction alike will often be the first contenders for the next generation of Sergeants. As far as disguises go, few will get you further amongst the common troops than the appearance of an Avencian Sergeant.

We will share more about the Avencian Sergeant in a later update.

For those waiting for new stages to finally get their hands on, we've plenty to report. Though we've talked about the levels briefly in previous updates, we haven't actually provided a metric for how many levels have been made up to this point in development. Let's do that now.

First, let's establish some what constitutes a stage by using the public demo as an example. The current public demo has three total stages or "screens" of varying length, to give you a sense of scale. After tallying up the total stages that have been blocked out and have their first iterations designed for the game so far, the number is currently over 50 stages of varying lengthcommenced for the main game with even more to come in the future.

These stages are all at varying levels of completion. Some are just the map itself with no enemies or objects. Others have enemy and alarm bell placements, as seen above. Some are in between. A handful of additional stages outside of those mentioned above have also been created explicitly for the playtest group as well, which were designed to test out specific mechanics and features in isolation that might not otherwise appear in the main game.

As with any art, we expect to make several iterations to the designs of these many stages and will no doubt cut some while adding others. Ultimately, the goal is to create a game that is full of satisfying content rather than padded with content that isn't fun. Striking that balance is very hard to achieve, but we'll be doing our best all the same. 

The Fortress Havenhold scenario will likely have somewhere between 9 to 12 stages total once we have completed our testing and adjustments. Unlike our current three stage demo, there's a lot more in store for Havenhold in terms of interconnectivity and overall design. Because of these new features, the data we collect from players once we roll out the Havenhold scenario will help us to really hone in on the best design practices for the rest of the game.

Recently, we've also recently finished the process of recreating the base tilesets we use for Necrofugitive as we aim to optimize our production pipeline for future stages. This process took a great deal of deliberation over the last few months as we tried to hammer down what precise shapes and patterns we want to be able to use in levels. With that complete, the next step is finishing up the new coat of paint across those shapes. With this in mind, we are now working with six general terrain types to play with on a given stage. This change also requires us to revisit our recently created levels and begin to update those environment assets with the new sheets. We're very excited to see how everything looks once the process is complete.

Distribution for our Private Playtest will take place via Kickstarter by way of Steam Keys. To provide a visual example, we previously tested out this methodology when our studio released DEAD MAN'S HAND: Card Roulette Action to a small playtest group. Those eligible for the play test will receive a Steam Key that creates a new title in their Steam library as depicted below.

Please be advised that the Steam Keys used for this playtest feature will NOT be the keys used to give access to the full game. If you write us a message asking about this, you will be directed to either this post or a future post that reiterates the same message.

Once again, the Steam Keys used for the playtest will NOT be the keys used to give access to the full game.

Composer Edwin Montgomery has been workshopping a few different tunes for the game as we work on the Havenhold scenario. Most recently, he has been working on a suitable track for the Order of Orelia Paladins. These champions of zeal and justice are among the greatest heroes of the realm. As such, they deserve a theme that befits this title.

We want to make sure players hear the full song only when it is completed. For our backers, however, we have a small teaser available for you. Edwin has put together a solo track featuring what he calls the Paladin Fanfare. We've produced a small video to let you hear it for yourselves.

Of course, this solo audio track featuring the fanfare cannot capture the full scope of what this theme is all about, but we're confident when you hear the whole thing together, you'll quickly come to know the awe inspiring might of the Order of Orelia.

For this installment of the community spotlight, we'll be giving a shout out to another member of our Discord community that has been active in the last few months: Tezy!

Tezy has spent a good amount of time putting together custom sprites for their own character concepts. We'll be sharing some of these fanworks below!

It's always really exciting when we have fans in our community taking the initiative to think about the world and its overall settings. It's even more exciting when we get to see custom OCs or character concepts that fans have placed into the scenario. One of the most entertaining parts of this is looking at the different ideas and considering how close to our official plans they might be. 

While Tezy's designs fall under the category of fan-art, you never know what might end up inspiring our team...

This time, our quick question is... do you prefer shorter games with very condensed levels, or longer games with content spread out across more levels?

Some players prefer a very short game with all of its content jam packed across a few short but memorable levels, while other players prefer a grand adventure with sprawling content that gets drip fed over time. Retro games tend to be good examples of condensed gameplay, often padded through increased difficulty, while other titles have a flatter difficulty curve but take longer to finish due to the sheer volume of content. 

Which do you prefer? Let us know your answer in the comments section or via the poll below!

That's all for this update! If you have any questions about the game, please be sure to leave them in the comments! We'll be checking back in with another update in the coming weeks. Thank you all once again for your continued support.