Hello, and welcome to the April 2025 Update for Untold Story.

Everything has been done. Not long after the last update, I finished all of the other development changes/additions left to do. Most of April has been spent on just playtesting and fixing the issues (mainly typos and minor softlocks/errors). That said, this game is long and I've really underestimated that. I'll get into the details of my current Playtest.

1st Full Playtest Stats

I'm still on my first full playtest, haven't even finished that yet between working and other stuff in life. As of right now, I am halfway through Chapter 7, at 27 hours in time. Some things to note about this 1st full playtest: It is 100% -- I am doing EVERYTHING. All quests, all collections, all optional dialogue. While that does add extra time, I also know the game a lot better than 1st time players will, so I know where to go, what to do, the best strats, so I think that balances out the time a bit.

Now, 27 hours in and I'm just about halfway done with all of the content in the game. Untold Story is very backloaded with content. Chapter 7.5 and 8.5 are the biggest chapters in regards to side content, and in previous playthroughs added over 15 hours combined of just sidequesting. Not to mention, my previous playthroughs had a bunch of quests that weren't done. Well, they are now, so that will had time too. I expect my final playtime to be at or even over 60 hours, which is an insane sentence to say. 

I'm saying all this to give some bad news to you and mostly myself: I don't think this game will be done by June. I'll 100% be able to finish this first playtest within May and fix all the errors, that I'm not worried about. The problem is that I want to do more playtests.  I want to fix the game balance so things aren't too easy or too hard. I want to do a playtest where I do the bare minimum and see how that fares, cause I want all playstyles to be able to play and beat Untold Story. 

Release Time

June is possible if I just finish this one and fix the issues, which honestly I am debating on whether to do that or not. Just release a 1.0 version that I know works. It may not be the most balanced but I'll know it runs. But the other part of me doesn't want to release something that isn't finished. If I go with this route, of making sure it is DONE, then release will likely be end of July to maybe August. At the very least, Untold Story is coming out in 2025. That is a fact. 

Something New

I mentioned a while back I'd mention what the Action Button really does, well here it is.

Compasses! The world of Atomous is big and honestly kind of empty. I didn't enjoy sailing around for every little quest and I knew where to go! Thus, compasses. While sailing, you can press the action button to bring up a list of compasses you have, selecting one will fast travel you to the location you want to go. It just quickens the pace of the game and mitigates needless sailing around.

That said, the player is completely free to sail around and discover locations at their own leisure. In fact, some places can only be discovered by sailing around. I know this isn't amazing or anything but it's something that I feel benefits the game and I wanted to share that with you all. Honestly, I'm running out of NEW things I want to share without getting into spoilers, so May will likely be the last one until the release.

That's all I've got for you today, thanks as always for sticking around. The game is nearly there.