Hi everyone, April has come to an end as progress continues on Zhara's frogtie and some remaining issues with 0.15 are being worked out.

Over the past week, we ran a poll asking you all which character would become the subject of our next all-out sprint to commission multiple poses of escape art. (If you haven't voted yet, you can do so here!) So far, Eileen commands the most votes, so expect an announcement shortly when results are finalized for us to begin our search for artists willing to join the cause.

If you voted for someone other than Eileen, rest assured that we currently do have plans for several other characters, and some others are actively being drawn, just at a slower rate since it may be only one person working on the character in their free time. I am continuously checking in with these artists to ensure their needs are met in terms of instruction and reference material.

I'd like to apologize for the what I feel like is a long duration of time that 0.15 has been delayed. Despite few reports of bugs or issues, we've had some concerning edge cases with users experiencing significant performance problems in these beta patches that we're still trying to figure out. This, along with some outstanding stuff with the suspicion meter not being fully implemented in some areas, has caused us to hold off on release a bit longer. I am hoping that we will be able to make final checks and release it publicly soon.

I am entering a busy period in my life for the next couple of months: Right now it's my last set of final exams to graduate from law school, and immediately after that I'll be preparing to take the California Bar Exam. If all goes well, I'll become a lawyer and get back to our regularly scheduled Overkill development. During these months I will still be around overseeing and directing the work of our artists and coders, and I expect the pace of development to remain about the same because usually the bottleneck for developing new content is the time it takes to draw new art. I'll totally understand if you choose to halt your subscriptions, either temporarily or permanently, but I promise that progress on creating new things for the mod continues and every contribution is hugely appreciated and helpful for getting new things made.

Just below, you can see a small preview of the beautiful work eliselle has been doing for Zhara's frogtie! Zhara's hair is quite complex, and various references from the game portray it differently, so the amount of effort that has been required to create this finished product has been rather huge. I can only imagine having to keep up the same level of quality for the 6 different hair images in the animation!

Thank you all for your patience, and we hope you will enjoy the upcoming mod updates.

Sincerely,
KombatWombat of the Overkill Team

Hi all! Though this announcement comes out for some of you on April Fools' Day, I assure you that this is a very real report and no trolling of any kind will occur (trust me).

Testing for 0.15 is underway and progress on Kaie's and Zhara's outfits and restraints for the escape system continues. We are still trying to resolve some issues with the Wyvern Peak Prison to properly get our new guard/ally interaction improvements working everywhere. Based on a lack of bug reports, there don't appear to be too many blatant issues in beta 1, but we're still looking for things that may have gone wrong. 

Uncle Biao responded to my latest messages and has provided our team with his completed art for about 1/3 of the comic pages he had planned. The rest of our artists are working on turning the sketches into lineart, matching his style as closely as possible. We will work on getting the comic into a more complete state so we can release it properly.

Also, just yesterday, the mod hit 50,000 downloads on itch.io! Thanks to all of you for continuing to follow our work, it means a lot!

Greetings, all! February has concluded as we remain hard at work getting the last few things in order before shipping the first beta for 0.15, sorry for the long wait! We've been working with some of our new members and receiving a large influx of new art materials from our artists that all need some attention before we can get them properly into the game.

0.15 will include the new Concealment system and will also implement a time cost for interacting with allies in an effort to make escapes less exploitable. We're trying to implement the same time costs that make sense for guard interactions (pleading, charming, threatening, etc.), but we've run into some snags that are breaking things in our code, so this could take a little while longer.

I am currently in the midst of implementing Kaie's hogtie, drawn by the talented Eclipse Luxary! Once this is complete, Kaie will have three of her four main poses implemented into the escape system, with default outfit and variants of it. Chairtie is still a work-in-progress, and I will share more information about it when I hear from the artist.

Thank you for your patience, as I know we've been slow with actual releases of mod versions. This is mostly due to the mod manager being completely nonfunctional for us due to issues with the software running out of memory and crashing (if that sounds stupid, it is, we can give you more details if you want to ask us in discord). Nevertheless, we have an arduous manual way to create mod patches that is still doable but not as quick and easy as I would like. We are hoping to find a way around this to more easily produce patches.

Anyway, that's February over, here's to a great March!

Hi everyone, in this first month of the new year we released 0.14 and a few bugfix revisions. Though the first beta for 0.15 is a work-in-progress, much has been going on behind the scenes in both art and code to take Overkill to the next level.

First among these new developments is the Suspicion System.  I had always felt that our real-time escape system was half-baked regarding the checkup mechanics: it did not feel fair or interactive to me that checkups always resulted in a tightening. Now we seek to remedy this problem with a system that will reward players for being careful to conceal their escape progress from guards, simulating a process of wrapping loose bindings around oneself to make them appear to still be in place even though escape progress has been made. Paid subscribers can read detailed review of this system here.

This month, a new code specialist, Ren, has joined our team. He did most of the work to develop the suspicion system and will continue to assist us in improving the mod's features.

Progress on art for Zhara, Aden, and Kaie continues. Panel Plug Gags for all poses are also in-progress. Thank you for having patience with our various artists who are all working on many projects at once.

Some new quests utilizing Overkill assets and systems are in development, we will try to include these in the upcoming beta 0.15

Also, I re-established contact with artist bill lao! He's currently busy with some other projects, but is thankfully alive and well.

Thank you for your continued support, we will strive to steadily continue creating a more complete and fun mod.

Hello everyone, and Happy Thanksgiving to all those of you who celebrate it! 

Aden 2.0 Graphics are completely drawn (for frogtie with pole)! Now comes the comparatively easier, but still time-consuming task of properly parsing the layers to create the necessary images for the escape system. eliselle did such a great job of putting things in separate layers that I'm a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of sorting everything properly. From now through the first half of December I'll be busy with final exams, but I'll still have some time to chip away at sorting through Aden's layers.

Kaie art continues for chairtie and hogtie. Many bindings still need to be edited for Kaie, Chelsea, and now new Aden.

Unfortunately, I have still not received any word on the health or safety of Bill Lao. Let us hope together as a community that he is alright.

Plans have been made for creating some new CGs featuring Eileen for a EIleen/Zhara team-up quest. This will take a significant amount of time to produce but I am hopeful that I will be able to work on it in addition to the other quests we have planned during my Christmas break.

The Battlebonds team has been hard at work creating new art and coding to expand and refine the game's features. When I get permission from them to show off some of their progress here, I'll be happy to share with all of you!

Thank you for your continued support for Overkill. You guys are the people I'm most thankful for this Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,
KombatWombat of OKGames