Heyo~

It's autumn and the spooky season again.

First off, we wanted to address how our current progress is looking against our previous goal of releasing in 2024.

Unfortunately, while we really wanted to hit 2024, it's become clear to us we can't physically can't hit that while maintaining quality. We're very sorry to push the game back again, but will keep you updated on our release plans.

A bright spot, though, is we're increasingly confident in saying we can see a finish line and we do feel confident that we can finish the game. A lot of our focus lately has been on polish and finishing assets rather than huge structural changes or additions, and we have some really pretty things to share in the next update or two. The biggest challenges, though, have come from balancing the progress we want to make versus our time and capacity.

Editing:

We finished editing Act 1 and have imported it into the game! The next steps include looking at the text in-game to see how well it plays, if there are any pacing or cohesion issues, and if we need to make tweaks to match its timing with sprites/CGs/gameplay/etc. Ideally, changes are minor so we can hand it off for a final edit pass.

Meanwhile, we're continuing right into Act 2 edits. Fortunately, we already did a pass on most of Act 2's story scenes and have imported them into the build, meaning edits to those scenes will more likely be very targeted. However, we still need to go over the exploration scenes and do rewrites to reflect gameplay changes that happened while building out the levels.

Art Things:

Progress on art assets continues at a steady pace. RL obligations slowed things down a bit since the last update, but we're happy to say we've finished art for all items and that they've been added to the game! The next step will be to finish puzzle art and zoom-in images (i.e.: newspaper clippings; pages; formula sheets; et.). 

We're also working on the final area of Act 2 that needs background art, and we're continuing CGs. Here's a tiny peak from one of our recent WIPs:

Thank you for reading, and thank you, sincerely, for support.