The Creature of Castorfield - December Update (Patreon)

Time again for another big blog post about the development of the Creature of Castorfield, except maybe a little different that you'd expect.

We just finished a big art rush on the project to get to a place where we can create an Itch page to start getting people outside the patreon excited about the project, but as that is quite an expensive endeavour, and couple with the ongoing mastercard crisis where all our games are delisted on Steam and Itch, it meant that we were a little over budget because the timing was very unfortunate. As we've said before the plan is to do our best to continue operating as normal, but that means that some times our projects have to take some minor sacrifices.

I know this is starting to read like we didn't get anything done this month, and that isn't true, we just didn't get as much done as we'd like. The main factor being budget, but the other factor that we've overcommitted a little bit on the new Sleeve Shock minigame, which is taking up more time than expected (but we're excited about it), and our main background artist is super busy this time of year (I work with her across THM projects, but a few other things as well)

So what did we get done for the Creature of Castorfield, and what were we hoping to get done?

We built out a lot of the architecture for where the player travels to and receives information in the last few updates, and that's waiting on our artist to come and work on things like buttons, and maps and book covers. There's plans to have lots of readable objects in this game, but unlike a visual novel ordinarily, it's all readable through images and graphic design, there's going to be zero use of the text box, but that means we need a tonne of background image assets, which is coming along a little slowly.

So instead what we've been focusing on is the opening scene. The sheriff main character, is being driven into town by a government agent, and they're talking about the town and what he is to expect. As I said above there's no use of the text box, so for the dialogue delivered in these scenes, is all through speech bubbles like a comic, so the time spent writing out the dialogue for these scenes is all done in photoshop and takes quite a while. This opening scene runs through three main beats, the MC is the car driving into the town, which is now complete, that was what the bulk of this month was spent working on. The second beat is a moment where the Sheriff arrives at his cabin, and we see him out the front with his bags, which is currently being worked on the background exterior of the cabin is the exact thing the artist is working on, and once that's complete Blackout will come and put the Sheriff into it. The third beat that the intro hits, is that you encounter one of the girls from the town who taunts and teases you a little bit as you're the only exciting thing to happen there for a while. Outsiders don't come through town very often. This scene will require a few things from Blackout of the different characters posed in the scene, and Blackout is currently working on the Sleeve Shock update.

I don't want you to read this like we're struggling to have multiple projects running at once, It's entirely a using our budget and time effectively problem, which means that Creature of Castorfield which is the least urgent of our projects, has less budget allocated to it each month, and I still spend the regular amount of time working on it. (It's also the only game update that I write a blog post about, the others I let speak for themselves) It also means that once projects like Grand BS hotel get closer to a finished state, and we're not pushing for bigger pieces like a character expression sheet, it'll be easier to add more pieces to The Creature of Castorfield.

I'm still very much excited about this project, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it's development comes along, as I think this has the potential to be our best game yet.