Escape From Blackwood Manor: Developers Log 18th October 2026 (Patreon)

Here's the weekly developers log, another very busy week for me as I'm charging ahead trying to get everything in full working order, hopefully so i can release v0.1.2 next Weekend

So here's another bit of feedback i got from the Demo, the save game system has been updated, it now shows you exactly what room you saved in and even takes a screenshot of where you're stood, nice QoL feature not much more needs to be said about it really

The majority of work i have been doing this week is the animation frames for the Escape System and there was a lot, like seriously a lot to do so i'll go over what i added then give you a peak behind the curtain to explain how the escape system works a bit so you understand how this took so much time but also show the positives of it which there are a lot

So we have a new character who will feature in the escape games, Amy who you might recognise being mentioned in the demo quite a bit, well i wont spoil what this is exactly because its a whole thing and im probably gonna do a video update on it since its pretty significant but both she and the main protagonist (cat) have new restraints for the escape system, so we have rope, harness, tape, Lock/shackle and now straitjacket

Okay so before i continue i gotta explain how this all works and why it took forever but also why now that its largely finished we have some serious positives, so theres 9 parts that can have restraints on a character, eyes, mouth, torso, forearm, hands, wrist, thigh, knees and ankles, and each of those (except for mouth, there will be tonnes of different gag's but im gonna just shorten it to 4 for convenience sake) have 4 minigames or restraint types, theres also dificulty for each of these ranging from 1-11 and on top of this, each of these restraints can be sealed (cant be removed) or locked (which will require a key to open)

Okay so as a joke i ran these numbers through chat gpt and got this as the total number of unique minigames i can make currently, not accounting for the move function or the use item function either

As you can imagine 10.6 quadrillion minigames is quite a lot (it's 1.29 million times Earth's entire population), you could say its too many, at least to fit into the base game for escape from blackwood manor, BUT, it gives me pretty much infinite room to work with when designing unique escape rooms with fun puzzle elements, which is why there will be an update in a few days about the way im going to tackle this, and i think your gonna like it I'm pretty excited myself

Okay so why did this take so long, you may notice in the picture i specifically said including Amy as a new character was pretty time consuming (it was), well the reason is because each single sprite for every single restraint has to be manually edited perfectly, they are essentially all layered together so when you see cat struggling your seeing up to 10 separate layers all synchronized perfectly, this means each individual part must be layered perfectly so they don't clip in front of each other, doing this for cat was one thing, but Amy was a completely new character and had a different outfit, which caused issues so i had to painstakingly edit each individual frame so they were all layered perfectly, the good news is this is finally over and the results will speak for themselves in a few days when the video update comes out

Another thing, as i mentioned, because each individual restraint is different and can be removed at any time this causes some issues (which ive resolved) with the move function, long story short because any combination of restraints can be active on a character at a given time this requires MANY unique player spritesheets to account for, so both Amy and Cat have like 47 unique spritesheets with almost every different possible combination, mostly for immersion, if your character is blindfolded and you go into the move function your player overworld sprite better be blindfolded too and have reduced visibility, i think some of you guys might have figured this out but im a stickler for the minor details

So, my work for the rest of the week is pretty much set, it might be obvious but with a new character we are gonna introduce an entire essentially second game which will be routinely updated since it is designed to be linear rather than the jumbled maze of infinite routes which is what Escape From Blackwood manor's base game will be

That's all for now, mid week update in a few days hopefully, stay tuned and leave a message or a comment if you have any questions