Development Update

This was a stressful month. We went back to to Act 1, looking to polish the scenes and test the story flow.

We expected at this stage to encounter quite a few bugs, but progressing through the scenes in different ways broke the game in several unexpected places and the month was spent fixing and improving the first Act.

It’s an essential part of making a game of course, but it always feels like this part of development isn’t about progressing, just fixing the mistakes from before.

That said, we’re added a few quality-of-life features to the game that we really feel adds to the experience:

• The Map is now part of your sketchbook and can be called up at any time without needing to move to a door (unless Jennifer is in a tricky situation).

• Alongside the map is a new ‘Objectives/Clues’ list. This won’t be point-by-point instructions (we still want you to solve the puzzles yourself), rather a list of your high-level goals, so you can always peek to remind yourself of what to do when pursuing multi-threaded puzzles.

• Big refinement of mouse control so the game can now be played entirely with mouse. This includes tweaks so that clicking another area of the screen while walking no longer automatically stops Jennifer, but let’s her change direction and right-click brings up your sketchbook.

Animating Frame by Frame

On the animation side of things, we made a big decision. The feedback from you was that the 2D-rigged style animation wasn’t offering the appeal of traditional adventure games, so we’re starting Jennifer’s walk animation from scratch in a hand-drawn frame-by-frame style.

This is obviously a big job, and John McFarlane is putting in weeks of extra work to make this the best version. It’s still a work in progress, but I think you’ll really appreciate the finished version.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Stephen and the Team at Outsider Games