Chapter 9 Progress + Chapter 10-13 Plans (Patreon)

Hello! It's me again with another progress update.

First of all let me happily state that Chapter 9 is progressing very smoothly and is expected to release before the end of May. Possibly as soon as next week. All of the major needs have been created and coded and I'm more or less going to spend the next few days making sure it all works and is balanced to a degree that I'm happy with.

From there, Chapter 10 is not expected to take very long either. Artwork has already been created in advance covering Tinman's introduction, his battle arts, and even the conclusion of the chapter. As well, a major new location was also made long in advance, with the important Manor exterior and interior maps having been used for the Alice In! Game Jam version, if any of you have played that. Chapter 10 will add a digging activity and the games final playable character. That is projected to be released some time in June.

That leaves the final 3 chapters of the game, and me with a bit of a dilemma. See, Project Red has some...odd construction compared to most games. The way most games would handle a chapter based structure, would be to include the final boss and main ending(s) within the final chapter. If not that, the chapter beforehand, with the final chapter acting as an epilogue. But Project Red is my own weird little game that doesn't quite adhere to either idea.

See, the "final boss" of Project Red is contained within chapter 11. Chapter 12 then holds the bulk of the games main endings. And Chapter 13 is a secret sort of, branching path, only accessible if you've done certain things, and solved a particular puzzle.

And with that, I think you can already see how the current release structure, doesn't really lend itself to these 3. Putting out chapter 11 by itself, and then making you wait a month at LEAST for the actual conclusion after your desperate struggle, really takes the wind out of your sails. And separating 12 and 13 which are so intrinsically linked just also feels bad, especially if you didn't leave yourself a save and now have to replay chunks of the games to return to that choice.

The more I've thought about it, the more it feels like the only REAL choice, is to bundle chapters 11, 12 and 13 into one update. Doing this would obviously mean that it takes longer to get the remaining chapters into your hands. But it would also make the experience of actually completing the game, much better.

So far now, i think that's what should be expected moving forward. There are ways to make the wait not quite as long as it sounds on the surface however. If I skip unnecessary things, like the tower battle mode, and some arcana souls, and things like that, I can focus solely on the main story. Then those elements can be added in an a following update that would officially take the game from early access, to full release.

So that's what I'm thinking.
May = Chapter 9 update
June = Chapter 10 update
July-???= Chapter 11-13 update
??? = Full Release update

Things will become clearer as we progress toward finalizing 11-13, but I will stress, a lot of aspects are still done in advance. All art related to the games final boss is completed already, Ending A has already been drawn of the main 5 endings. And with some extra free time this month I may just jump ahead into later chapters to try and shrink the wait down. Either way, this is where things currently stand. Feel free to leave your thoughts of feedback here on this!