Dear Villains and Villainesses,

This is Tanya and Emily, the developers of Save the Villainess. We have a lot of fun game updates to show you this April. We're celebrating Jane's birthday, showcasing the end of the Dream Lovers tournament, and have footage of a special ‘date’ with the tournament winner. Stay tuned for more mayhem and madness!

This month was a great month for those who love to delve deep into intricate plots with plenty of suspense, character interactions, and mysteries! Our writing and programming focused on our game’s mysteries, with us first revising, editing, and then programming Scene 16.

Scene 16 is a complex and fun multi-part puzzle that will lead to an upcoming in-game climax. For this scene, we edited and reworked items from our existing bedroom background so that they could be used as part of a point and click puzzle.

As is a key goal of our game, both the correct and incorrect choices in the scene offer something interesting for your play of the game. If you make the incorrect choice, you’re one step closer to a bad ending but might discover some easter eggs and clues to the larger mystery. If you make the correct choices, you’ll be rewarded with very special scenes featuring characters you already know…

We also completed the writing and programming for Scene 17, which features Jane and a special guest while providing hints of dark secrets and surprises.

Additionally, we worked on writing and editing Scenes 18, 19, and 20. All these scenes needed to be co-edited together because the mystery deduction choices that appear in Scenes 16 and 17 are linked to the outcomes you experience and the deductions you can complete in Scenes 18, 19, and 20. Ultimately, we set up a complex set of interwoven conditional deductions that will allow you to learn much more about the relationships the villains had with her possible former fiancés. This newfound knowledge may be touching or troubling, depending on how you interpret it…

This April 6th, we celebrated our villainess Jane’s birthday! Jane is our loving tribute to all of the many neurodivergent women we have known and loved. She’s a little bit of Katarina Claes from My Next Life as a Villainess, a little bit of Princess Mia from Tearmoon Empire, a lot of our own experiences as neurodivergent women on the autism spectrum… and her own weird, complicated, brilliant, and very subtle self.

Ultimately, Jane is a person who is trapped in a terrible situation who can still finder her way to freedom and justice with your help. We hope you can see a reflection of yourself in her desire to survive no matter what horrors the world tosses at her.

As you can see, Jane is determined to love herself on her birthday despite the forces against her. You can join our mailing list and email us for this month's character cards[subscribepage.io] to learn what Edmund, Izel, Ben, and Servant would say to Jane on her birthday!

This month, we had the pleasure of seeing different people play through Save the Villainess’ demo in great detail.

First, Chirkrasia[bsky.app] played through our entire demo. She brought her beautiful voice and a brilliant artist’s eye to the game and discovered some recurring motifs and details we hid into our backgrounds and character designs. Tanya also spent about an hour chatting with Chirkrasia and other viewers in each stream. You can see more of her Save the Villainess streams on her twitch videos page[www.twitch.tv].

Second, Amyseekmeout is creating a detailed playthrough of our demo under the [Save the Villainess → #stv-playthroughs-threads → Amy’s Demo Playthrough] section on our discord server[discord.com]. She and other brilliant players have discovered several hidden secrets, including food choices that shout out to Marie Antoinette (one of our major inspirations), hidden themes of revolution, and the importance of bear traps. To help her discover more secrets, please check her playthrough thread on our discord[discord.com].

This April, we completed our dream lover contest with a final round between our two most popular love interests – Izel Kuzey, Duke of the North, and Servant, the mysterious maid/butler of the House. They had a fierce battle but in the end, Servant won the vote for the Dream Lover among our non-villainess cast.

Izel had an interesting response to his defeat.

Won’t you please donate a few gold coins to a Kuzey grandmother and save a three-headed raccoon today?

Meanwhile, Servant was initially puzzled by your desire for them… until they decided they understood just what you meant.

Even better is that Servant’s reward for winning the title of Dream Lover was a ‘date’ with Jane. So what happens when a slightly terrifying maid meets with a survival-minded villainess?

All hail the two best lovers in the land!

Finally, please remember you can always catch us at the various sites below:

• Our discord server[discord.com] - come chat with us and hear what other players have discovered about our game!
  
• Our mailing list[subscribepage.io] - we send free cards featuring new banter from our main characters every month. This March, Jane, Edmund, Izel, Ben, and Servant talk to you about their favorite reading materials in honor of National Reading Month!
  
• Youtube, Bluesky[bsky.app], and Tumblr[www.tumblr.com] - our main social media accounts

Thanks again for joining us for another lovely month and update, friends. We’ll see you in April with the winner of the Dream Lover tournament and with more fun updates on our game!

With Much Love,
Tanya & Emily
Best Laid Plans Productions, Inc.