Let's chat Chapter 13 (Patreon)

It hasn't been that long since the last devlog, but still with the start of September I figured it would be a good time to lay out where we're at and discuss what's still left to do.

So, as was stated last month, since I finished chapter 12 with some time to spare, I was able to get a head start on 13. In that time span I was able to layout roughly the entire secret final dungeon, as well as start setting up the puzzles and various events.

So sprinkled throughout here I'll post some pictures of the various rooms you can expect to explore, but not too much else. While 90% of the enemies do exist already, the battles are not programmed in so nothing I can share there just yet.

The games final location is a massive indoor dungeon. It might be a bit overwhelming at the start, but you'll have lots of rooms to explore and puzzles to solve as you try to progress to the basement, where the truth lies.

The lighting is still in a placeholder state, but I had a lot of fun making these much larger, interconnected locations. The 2 floors you explore here tie for the largest maps in the entire game. My core inspiration, if it wasn't obvious from the lobby, was Resident Evil 1. I absolutely adore that game, and there might be more than a few familiar elements here if you've also played it haha.

The entirely indoor setting required me to really think about the game and its mechanics in different ways. For starters, camp fires can't really exist inside random rooms easily! So I had to sort of recontextualize a lot of things. Making sure to account for all of the typical things a player has access to while exploring outdoors. Places to use the bathroom or wash off blood, or lower arousal. Where to heal and save etc, etc.

So each room here really had to serve a core purpose, from setting up lore or information, to being a puzzle, or containing a key item, to even just being a place to rest or fight monsters. That's definitely a big part of why this area had to be so large. In terms of plot progression, I was pretty adamant as well that I wanted to represent pretty much everything a player should have learned while playing the game, and make them use it here. A real sort of test of your abilities after this very long night!

It was also important to me to try as much as possible to make the space feel some what "real," rather than a collection of puzzle rooms. It needed a dinning hall, a kitchen, a bathing chamber, bed rooms, library, everything I could reasonably think up really!

I think I landed on a pretty good balance of interesting and distinct rooms vs more mundane, purposeful ones. And once the lore relevant items and enemies are added, even those mundane rooms should end up having SOMETHING interesting!

Here's some of that broken lighting test haha. Quite a lot of brand new assets were created entirely for this dungeon, from new wall and floor tiles, to all sorts of clutter laying around the rooms. But the puzzle related items took the bulk of thinking out. Take these suits of armor for example, there's 3 different varieties and that's just for one particular puzzle.

Red can finally use an actual toilet! Someone's probably going to be mad about that...but hey you have 12 chapters without one, so just let her have this!

There's even a cute little art room! I wonder who was being painted?

Anyways, with the first and second floors more or less complete, I'll be next focusing on the basement. I've already created a few assets over the weekend to get me started and will probably work on the basic foundation after I share this progress. It wont be anywhere near as large as the upper floors, so it should be a much quicker process.

That'll leave me with plenty of time to work on the final ending CG's and the epilogue. But even so, that won't be the end of it all.

I said this before, but the game likely has 2 major updates left. The first is adding chapters 11-13 to the early access, allowing players to complete their run. The second will be moving out of early access into full release, with all features complete.

But there's a bit MORE I'd like to include in the next update beyond just the finished story chapters. A few of the major arcana are still missing art, and so have no item or arcana souls available for use. A few more dead end/gag ends still aren't really present. And one more feature that I've only really shared on my discord so far, but I'd like the next update to incorporate some of the animations I've been working on.

Things like unique defeat animations, or context sensitive actions. I won't delay the update to add these by any means, but I'd like to at least feature some of the completed ones.

Regardless, I'll be sticking to my usual schedule of 1 month = 1 chapter. And so even if I DO finish chapter 13 early, I will use the extra time to add even more content into the update. You should expect the story update to launch in October.

After that, it'll be polishing the game, fixing reported bugs, and adding in all the remaining features that aren't yet present, like the extra battle mode, and the scene reviewer, as well as new game plus features.

So I expect this to be a pretty busy month, but I wanted to take the time to let everyone know where we're at, and what to expect going forward. But that's all for now, and it's back to the dungeons I go!

Hope to have good things to share soon!