Dear Villains and Villainesses, 

This is Tanya and Emily, the two developers behind Save the Villainess. We’re here to wish you a Happy Lunar New Year – one that we hope is full of hope, joy, and growth for you! We’ll also share our monthly update about our game, including fantastic news on a major development for young Jane, a celebration of Servant's birthday, and a conclusion to last month's elimination game. We are starting 2025 off with a bang!

Our major news is that we’ve completed our initial programming of the teenage version of Jane , the villainess of our game’s title! As you can see from the video below, young Jane’s face, hair, and body are now fully animated and ready to come to life in the flashbacks of our story.

Every character model within our game is a custom work of art which can take 100+ hours to complete. Animating a single character model is a painstaking process that involves everything from the initial character creation to the creation of character parts to the animation of the character in the game engine. 

Even so, we love the process of animating each of our characters because we can give each of them their unique sense of life and personality. Thank you again for your support as we go on this journey with every single character in the game!

We also made great progress on our writing as well this month! We were fired up by the long but important process of animating teen Jane and thus, sat down with our master outline and wrote out two very important flashback scenes with her.

These scenes include some special guest stars that you’ll only learn about when you play the game itself. As you'll see when you witness the scenes, nothing about Jane is as it seems at first sight… and the interactions young Jane has with others may tell a different story than the one you think is unfolding.

January also marks the amazing and enigmatic Servant's birthday – which technically took place on January 1st!

In honor of this special event, Jane, the villainess lead of Save the Villainess, is interviewing Servant. Hear them spill a few secrets about themselves and the world below.

Do you feel the need to pry a few more secrets out of Servant? You’ll have to play the full game to learn more of what they are hiding….

Finally, we wanted to bring you a conclusion to the elimination game that started last month! Cloudy_floofs started the game, which gradually whittled down the 18 (yes, 18!) characters and/or creatures and/or unholy abominations that showed up in our demo to one remaining contestant.

Every time one of the most important characters were eliminated, they even wrote a little card to express their feelings. You can preview the cards below or take a closer look at them in this google drive folder.

A few people also expressed their strange distaste for Ben Buren, our game’s childhood friend. Of course, Ben had to respond.

Finally, after fans voted on all our social media, one person was left standing. So she's ready to thank you for keeping her safe!

Friends, we thank you for spending another month with us and hope you have a wonderful year ahead of you. Please remember you can always catch us at the various sites below:

1. Our discord server - come chat with us and hear what other players have discovered about our game!
2. Our mailing list - we send free cards featuring new banter from our main characters every month. This month, Jane, Edmund, Izel, Ben, and Servant tell you want they think about Servant!
3. Youtube, Bluesky, and Tumblr - our main social media accounts

We hope you have a wonderful year ahead of you as well. Thanks for your support and take care until we talk again!

With Much Love,

Tanya & Emily

Best Laid Plans Productions, Inc.