Hey everyone! The script for Episode 5 of Scarlet Hollow is finally finished, bringing the total word count for the game up to 884,000 words. This is the longest and most complicated chapter of the game to-date, coming in at 250,000 words, or 31% larger than the entirety of Slay the Princess, including its expansion. This won't be the final word count, either, since the script usually grows in length by a fair bit while I make edits and additions during implementation. For reference, Episode 4 was ~185k words in total, and for broader cultural context, the entirety of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and The Silmarillion altogether comes in at 700,000 words.

[img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/40371863/654e70beea40120cc321e1f5b1caaf6cd5b84cd7.png"][/img]Finally. We're here, but at what cost?

So! What's next? When Episode 5? Give it to me now? There's still a lot of work to be done before it's ready, but we're confident it will be finished before the end of the year. Walking you all through what we have so far, and what we still need to do:

• Art! Episode 4 had 129 new full page background illustrations and 1,424 new sprites. I would assume a roughly similar number of assets for Episode 5. This is what Abby will be focusing on in the coming months, though I (Tony) also get to draw a few this time around >:]

• Episode 5 (plus the new ending for Episode 4) is split across 46 script files. On top of adding audio and visual assets to these files, we also need to format them and add in variables and checks against relationship and prior systems. That part of the work is finished for 8 of those files at the time of this writing.

• Music and audio design! Brandon has already finished a few tracks, and the music and SFX have always been finished ahead of everything else (thank you Brandon and Phil!)

Now that the script is finished, we'll be able to start providing more regular content updates before we had hard numbers on us, the best we could say was "more writing was done," which doesn't feel like saying much of anything, but now we can let you all know as individual scenes get finished finished. We'll be posting monthly progress updates on Steam, as well as our newsletter, which I'd recommend subscribing to! (We don't get spammy with it.) Thank you all so much for your patience while we've pushed ourselves this far. Scarlet Hollow is a beast of a game in scope and the deeper we've gotten into its narrative, the more demanding it's become, both in terms of the quantity of writing we have to do, and also the care we have to take in balancing the game and making sure that player choices feel like they actually matter. Scoping out the rest of the game, I believe that Episode 5 will ultimately be the longest individual chapter of the story, so the wait shouldn't be quite as long after its release until we reach our conclusion. All the best, Tony and Abby