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Third Content Update: Hope you like NPCs

Well, that took a while.

I'm afraid by this point, a lot of subscribers have probably concluded that Guardian Frontier is on hiatus or abandoned. The truth is, I just feel awkward making public progress announcements which nobody has asked for unless I have new content to release. I never put Guardian Frontier aside, I'm just a terrible publicist.

The length of this release will vary a lot depending on how much time you spend walking around and talking to people. This update contains a lot of NPC content. Not only does it contain more NPCs and NPC dialogue than the previous updates combined, it's entirely possible that it will contain more NPC dialogue than the entire rest of the first chapter combined, once that's complete.

There's also a lot of Easter Egg content in this update. Probably, even players who try to make a point of exploring the whole game thoroughly aren't going to catch all of it. This isn't even a matter of my aiming for game design that rewards exploration, I just throw this stuff in because I honestly can't help myself.

The kind of eventing content that went into this update takes me a long time to put together though, and as obsessed as I might be with NPCs, making so much of one type of content at a time still saps a lot of my momentum. I was originally hoping to have this update out in January, but obviously that didn't pan out so well. I'd say I've learned my lesson, but honestly I knew from the start that my plans for this section were kind of crazy. But this is one of the earliest-planned segments of the game, and while a lot of the specifics have changed since it was first conceived, I'm glad to have gotten something out that stays more or less true to my original vision of it.

The next update after this one will have more of a focus on wilderness-based content, and shouldn't take as long for me to complete. There's a reason Guardians don't spend most of their time hanging around in cities.

If anyone wants more frequent updates on this game's development, feel free to let me know. I may be reluctant to advertise, but I'm always happy to answer questions.

Posts

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nice to know you put so much effort in npcs, i often find that if people had just thought up their npcs some more and added some extra ways to interact with them that arent strictly necessary to the story it would make their games so much more alive and interesting, i guess i really wont have to worry about that when it comes to this game.
If you want an extra way to interact with NPCs that's not strictly necessary, you could try deciphering this update's Gudyushika dialogue.



I tried to put in enough clues and cues to make it possible to work out a lot of the vocabulary from context. There are absolutely no rewards in gameplay for figuring any of this out, just a bunch of extra dialogue hidden behind a language barrier. The sentence structure is mostly the same as English, if anyone wants to take a stab at it. That's not just to make things easier on players, I am not an expert conlanger, so if I tried to make the process more complicated I'd never have been able to get it all done. It was fun to experiment with, but let's just say putting it all in didn't exactly help me get the release out faster, so this is not a challenge I'm likely to return to for later updates.
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