The Khenbish Update (Build 0.6.1) is coming out on May 6th at 5PM UTC.

That's right! It only took us a little more than two months, too, even if it's really big. And I hope you enjoy the promo picture above, kindly provided by dilukha.

Here's a table of time zones for your convenience.

Content

Build 0.6.1 adds 6 hangouts for Khenbish and 2 R&D projects, which altogether amount to approximately 70,000 words. Basically a novel and a half worth of content, mostly written over a period of two months and a half.

Khenbish's hangouts comprise roughly two thirds of the word count, it's the main attraction. His content, as with Kota's and Luke's hangouts, can be accessed through the management screen by keeping him out of R&D and Exploration for a day, then choosing to give him a day off.

I don't want to give any spoilers but there're two points worth bringing up, so you can hopefully enjoy the most out of them.

1. The 4th hangout includes a NSFW scene. It's skippable (if you picked SFW Mode or if, at that point, you choose to "Avert your eyes") and does not involve the MC nor Asterion. It comes with CGs, similar to what we had for Kota's NSFW scene in his route.
   However, unlike Kota's this one is an interactive scene. It plays out identical to the kiss with Asterion at the end of Chapter 18, where you can pick actions from a menu and control the flow of the events. It also ends differently depending on how many options you picked (the more you pick, the higher the chances you'll get a particularly big finish).
   Our plan is that, when we get there, Asterion's sex scenes will be built using this same system. This means that Khenbish's NSFW scene is the prototype of how it will work. We could really use some feedback on it, so I enthusiastically invite you to tell us what you thought after you play it — particularly if you have suggestions on how to improve it.
2. The 5th hangout has the wrestling event. In this part of the game you'll have all your recruited staff members having a few wrestling matches for fun. This means that you'll get more interactions the more characters you have in your team at that moment.
   Originally the wrestling event was supposed to be bigger than it currently is, but development went on we struggled to make more interesting matches without breaking characterization and we had to pull time away from it to work on two extra events (originally this update would add 4 Khenbish hangouts, but we went instead with 6). We also had to future-proof it so we don't need to redo the whole thing for when you have Oscar, Pedro and Nikos recruited.
   As such, there is sadly a nice amount of interactions which cannot be normally accessed in-game despite being fully coded, and the whole event is not as big as we would have preferred. This also means that we could not incorporate the suggestions you guys sent us. Hopefully the whole update is still very satisfying regardless!
   Anyway, for best results here you should reach this hangout with the most people recruited to your team as possible. As the game goes on and we add more content this event will evolve and automatically get more content...

Now, this update also adds 2 R&D projects: the pool and the outdoors bar. As you may recall if you've been following our previous DevLogs, these two events originally were supposed to be paired with Kota's content (after all, he's a water dragon whose river was used for sake) but we ran out of time. 

Mechanically it's very straightforward. The pool is a larger project that will take a bit of time to complete, you'll need to invest a robust team to get it done. After you finish it you unlock a follow-up project which adds an outdoors bar to the pool.

Both of those scenes play like the drinking game and the wrestling event, in the sense that they bring together all the characters you've recruited so far. I highly recommend that you go in with as many people recruited as possible if you want to see the most content. This content is also future-proofed and will play differently further down the road, when Asterion and the MC are dating officially and when you have Oscar, Pedro and/or Nikos recruited.

Now, this makes it three big events in this update alone which change a lot depending on who you have recruited — and all of them have scenes written for Nikos, Pedro and Oscar. That's a lot of content we worked on that's not accessible!

So, after some thinking we agreed on a decision which you might really appreciate: for now we are putting in a way to access these scenes in their fullest form, as if you had recruited all characters. Here's how you do it:

1. You must have gotten to the end of Chapter 18 at least once.
2. Start a fresh save file and pick "Anon" as your character's name.
3. Skip ahead and you'll be taken to the VIP Room where you can see these scenes.

The VIP Room is not a permanent thing. At some point down the road we will remove it, so don't get too used to it!

But to leave you with some goodies...

Other Stuff

After we release Khenbish's update we will properly announce a new thing I've been working on. It's a short story (which we turned into a micro visual novel of sorts) I wrote in a single go as an exercise to get over a brief creative block. The whole thing is around 6,000 words now and it's meant to be read in a single sitting. It may get a bit bigger as we edit it, but even then it should not take more than an hour to go through.

A visual novel this short may be weird for many of you, but it's not coming out of nowhere. We, developers, often struggle with getting exhausted from working on long projects for years. Sometimes we just need something fresh and different to get our creative juices flowing. This short story was an experiment in trying to quickly execute and deliver a complete story in the shortest amount of time possible.

In terms of content, it's a homage to Berserk, Dark Souls and Elden Ring. If you are familiar with these works, and if you like scrunkly anthro dudes wielding ultra greatswords and zweihanders, maybe you'll get a kick out of it. It will have optional NSFW content too, but depending on scheduling it may come out as a content update later.

And here's a final gift, for now — a Robert picture made by Alpha0!