Hey everyone,

We just wanted to give a quick update (This took us 2 hours to write... so "quick".) on the game and why after quite a few days of activity (or rather a few months of rapid activity. If you know, you know.) we just went silent.

Let's start off with the easiest one to get out of the way:

-How's the gameplay so far?-

The game is being worked on as much as we can on our downtime...

A lot of thought is currently being poured into the core gameplay loop. Which as of right now consists of just:

-> Player picks the Act they want to start in. (Yay.)

-> Player can do things like in the Novels, or can interact/do things differently. (Which will lead to a cavalcade of future things to change and/or will cause battles to emerge.)

-> ??? (We're working on this bit... Presumably the cavalcade of Totally awesome, Very good, Absolutely perfectly fine turn of events! Aka: bad things happen.)

[One of the lower 3 points will happen after that "???".]

-> Player reaches a "fail" state. (Unable to progress the narrative/Unable to reach any other states at that point in time or at all. Death isn't a "fail" state btw, Because death has many... Opportunities offer... )

-> The player reaches an "EoA" state. (And progresses into the next "Act".)

-> Or the player reaches an "Ending" state. (Which the player will be given the option before going back into the Main Menu to "Save" one of their consumable items for their next playthrough.)

Which yes, All of this to say- This requires a lot of Script Writing and foresight with how many choices we are going to give the player in-game... (Hey who said gamedev was supposed to be easy!?! (Said no one ever..!))

-How does the game look right now? -

It's getting there...

However we've hit a major roadblock with the actual making of sprites. (Mainly the art style we were aiming for.) We wanted to make the game look "unique" in how everything looks so "polished" and at least somewhat "Realistic" (Realism wasn't our goal, but we can't say it wasn't an influence) ((Also note: We don't mean the In-Engine lighting & Normal Maps on the sprites, those are easy to make and work around. What we're talking about the Cutscene Sprites mostly.)

Unfortunately we as an artist can't keep up with how demanding the animations are going to end up being to make total with how the cutscene sprites currently look style wise.

Which in hindsight is funny (at least to us) because even if they look "good" we have more fun and enjoy animating and making:
- Overworld stuff (like characters, Tiles, and interactive stuff)
- Battle stuff (Like the enemies, the character portraits, and the custom weapon/item animations)
- In-gameplay cutscenes (like the previous post below this one on the game page)

So one must ask now: "What are we going to do now? Are you going to just turn the out-of-gameplay cutscenes into gameplay cutscenes or..?"
There is no simple answer for this unfortunately... Because we love the cutscene system that we currently have made (And we would REALLY love to keep using it). So we're still up in the air with this... We'll get back to this in a later post once we've decided.

-How's that "Being the composer for this game" going?-

We're working more and more on the game's OST.

We've had a LOT of growing pains with picking out a good sort of... "Style"/"Genre" of music that the majority of the OST will be like. (And we're not just talking about the battle themes here..)

We originally wanted the OST to be very "EDM/IDM musician sound mixed with organic soundscapes and atmosphere" kinda vibe (If you want an example of that just search up Infected Mushroom OR Subnautica's OST on YT, that sort of sound), but given we've never had any real EDM/IDM skills, (We're more of a melodic/harmonic meets sound design kind of composer..) it makes it hard to really encapsulate that sort of "ecosystem" in the OST that feels right...

As we make more of this game's OST, the more we will improve. And the more we improve the more "Clearer" the this game's style will be as a whole! (Because right now it's all over the place quality and structure wise...)

With that out of the way, The Video at the top of this post is a short clip of a track for this game. Quite proud of how it's turning out..!

-"Why haven't you posted as much as when you started this game (And before that as well)????"-

We haven't posted in a while because of irl catching up to us.

A LOT of stress and anxiety irl has been just shooting down our mood to be online at all..
While our motivation is at it's highest to work on this project and to showcase what we can do to the world, our physical health (And very much our mental health) has been quite low. So low that we've basically have slowly started to forget/stop taking our meds & Estrogen (and among other things as well)... (Up until one of our headmates tried to help and "repair our life" for the rest of us.. (Thank you Andrew..!))

We've been holding back from saying anything online (other than to our close close inner circle of friends) about our mental, physical, and emotional state, but it needs to be said:

Stress, Anxiety, and Depression. Those three are some dark, hellish, and hurtful kind of drugs.. And we're not taking them by choice...

So yeah we're going to S L O W down on posting things about this game so we don't feel peer pressured into posting what we're doing 24/7 with the game...

We'll post something only when we're ready to post things.
Other than that... This post is done!

Thank you for the support..! ~ Windy "Springs" System (Aka: CatDev/Sophie)