October Progress Report (Patreon)

It's the middle of the month, so time for the usual progress report for Project Red.

October has been spent kind of jumping around all over the place. Between the voice acting for the new content coming in, working on art for more scenes, and finalizing certain gameplay mechanics, there's no overly coherent way to break things down. So I'll just go through the topics as I see fit!

A New Start?

No better place to start than with the literal beginning! If you've played the demo or early access, the you know upon launching a new game, you're met with a black screen that pretty blandly asks you to set the games content and difficulty levels.

This sequence has been brought to its final stage and fully replaced. There is actually a character speaking to you now, and some very significant lore that i will not be showing off what so ever. But just know that the full release will be hitting you with a brand new experience right from the start.

Something more important to showcase from this section however, are the final difficulty levels for Project Red and what they mean.

Currently we have a Story Mode and a Hardcore Mode. This has been updated to 3 new modes.

Fairy Tale Mode: This is essentially the same as the previous Story Mode, however the amount of in game time you have at your disposal has been increased. Sunrise is at 6am so beginning at 8pm gives you 10 hours to spend on various events, resting at camp fires and progressing the story. Plenty of time to casually enjoy your experience.

Endless Night: This is the new normal/standard difficulty. Unlike the current build, that begins the game at 9pm, you will start at 10pm. Enemies will also have the same enhanced skill list as they did in hardcore mode.

Nightmare: The ultimate masochistic experience for those of you who love a good stressful experience. Begin at midnight, with only 6 hours to complete the game. This basically makes it so that you cannot afford to fail at any point, as well as certain choices or activities that cost time, now become much harder to justify. On top of that, enemy encounters will be further buffed with more powerful attacks.

And speaking of time...

Time Related Mechanics

The new difficulty modes aren't the only things that will be interacting with the in game clock. Those shops you can find at the merchant camp will also be effected, though in even more ways.

To start with, the stores will now have limited stock. You can't just buy infinite supplies to grind through every problem anymore. But, give it a few hours, and they'll put more of their items on sale for you.

Come around at the right time, and they might even be having a sale. Shop inventory has also been updated, with a number of new weapons in particular being added to account for the various new classes. Knives, Swords, Axes, Whips, Wands, Greatswords and more!

Which is a perfect segue into some art!

Completed Tarot Deck

I've completed the full Tarot deck for Project Red! The tarot are of course both in game items, and in game classes. So with all the art being done now, there's a lot more items and classes that will be popping up in the update.

Reinstating cut content and finalizing existing content

And then of course, a lot of my time has gone into adding in the cut stuff and cleaning up the existing stuff. Right now i'm just using the sketches as placeholders to create the "new" scenes but it's still going to take some time before I get everything set up and playable.

Finishing Chapter 13

Then of course we also had Chapter 13 itself! I was able to go ahead and complete all of the remaining CG's, save for one joke ending that I still need to start on.

Effectively most things are sitting in a slightly incomplete state. The 2 biggest missing pieces right now are the last ending, and the games end credits. Though I'm a bit stuck on both, for different reasons.

In conclusion, a ton of work has been done, though it's not really stuff that's super cool to share. Or in the case of the lewd stuff, not something I can reasonably share as i write this up from my day job haha.

But I have been making an effort to share a bunch of the sketches, as well as the full tarot deck on my patreon, so feel free to check that out if you'd like to see more of the art in particular.

A lot of things that I am so excited for you to experience in game, but not too much that I'd like to show off kinda thing. My goal for the end of this month is to have all of the content in a playable state. A lot of assets will still be placeholders but as long as it's playable, the final rounds of playtesting can begin. So I'm going to keep chipping away at it, making art and sprites where I can.

I think I'll shoot for the old release date as the play testers build date. November 13th. My gift to myself for my birthday will be bug reports haha. But we'll see where i've gotten by the end of the month to see if that's going to hold true or not!

Until then, back to work I go!