Escape From Blackwood Manor: Developers Log 11th October 2026 (Patreon)

Gonna be a big one today it's been a really busy week for me, the reception for Escape from Blackwood manor has been crazy so I've been motivated to work on the game pretty much non stop for the whole week, I'll go over what I'm working over as briefly as i can since there's quite a lot today, i guess skip to the bottom if you want to hear about when the next game release will be

So, had a lot of feedback and wile a lot love the escape games there are a few who think the escape games are too hard or too easy, and some of you guys want it to be insanely difficult to escape, on that note I've added in optional difficulties for the escape games, easy (progress twice as fast) and hard (progress twice as slow) , the game is scaled around normal dificulty but these seemed like a good compromise and also optional, there is also Sadistic dificulty (4x scaling on all restraints) but that i might save for later in the game

Another thing, and this was one of my thoughts, in the escape menu if you have identified a restraint there's a little icon to say which kind of minigame it is next to the button, just a small feature, now the big feature, the one i spent a bit of time on is the Overcharge system, this one is actually good because it only rewards you if your good at the minigames, basically if you play perfectly and don't make mistakes the combo bonuses multiply, make any mistake and it resets, it's a way of rewarding people for playing well and the overcharge can carry over to other minigames if you beat a minigame with it so there's a bit of strategy involved, I also added in two new pages to the "how to escape" section to explain it all along with some Chibi art

Another thing people noted, in the demo it doesn't really explain how to combine items, so i included a little section where it briefly mentions you can do this, kind of my fault this one i didn't think to include it for some reason

Some more features I'm working on, the booby trap mechanics and also I updated the AI pathfinding to be a bit better, you'll see soon hopefully

Also, more escape game animations, I just finished the harness animations last night in fact since there's a section where that will probably happen in the next part of the game, i've also added in some more character animation busts (upped to around 950 i believe), a lot of people liked how expressive the characters were and to be fair i love making expressive characters so lots more are being worked on, like i said even for mundane things like picking up a pair of scissors or leaning against a vending machine i like to make them all animated because it makes "Cat" feel more like a real character and they're fun to animate

I don't want to ramble on so i'll finish up by saying i made a lot of new overworld sprites too for the floor, walls, objects for the new areas which I've dubbed the Vestibule, catering wing, asylum wing and the Isolation wing as well as the north Prison wing, you can see some in the image above, wont how off too much though because i want people to explore the rest of the manor at their own pace when the game is done

There's a lot more that's been done such as some bug fixing, but you can check the stuff I'm currently working on in the dev log image above, now to the next release

The current build of Escape from Blackwood manor is 0.1.1 and for the most part (apart from a syntax error) it's fairly stable, as much as i would love to upload a new build of the demo now with all the improvements i don't feel right as they haven't been extensively tested yet at least by myself and i don't want you guys to encounter annoying bugs, another thing is i'm kind of on a roll with just developing the game and should probably keep at it, many of you guys have asked when the full game will be out and i cant really give a definitive answer to that yet as there's still so much to do, but I read recently that Look Outside (which is a really good game made in the same engine) was completed from its game jam variant in only 5 months, now i'm nowhere near as good a developer as Frankie but i have a crazy ass work ethic and literally have been working on the game non stop so hopefully you can expect to not wait forever for this game to be out, and when it is out expect a lot of updates for many new routes

Anyways i'll finish this off, we have a poll for Sarah Miler running at the moment that ends at 12 today, so i'll announce the results of that tomorrow and will probably think of something else to poll, most likely weather or not we need a discord as traction here has defiantly upped

That's all for now, to my patrons and sponsors thanks so much for supporting me honestly cant do this without you, will hopefully do a mid week update if anything important happens