Yup, it's that time, reflect on the year and all that fun stuff. So with that, the milestones! Act 1 Released Ah yeah, this was the best and craziest thing. There I was, making some last minute changes to the Steam Store settings, two days prior to launch, plenty of time for some more testing, when I accidentally hit the Publish button. Immediately it went into the Steam featured new releases list and I wasn't even sure the Steam repo actually worked on all platforms yet! Eep! It was bumpy, but hey - we learned, and thankfully it was all more or less good, bar a few fixes to the soundtrack DLC. Bundles Being a bit of a niche product, we turned to bundles for additional income and exposure. We've pretty much been in every darned bundle ever, with three more to follow. Generally I would not recommend bundles for most developers. If you can manage without them, it's probably best to wait until your game hits the infamous "long tail". Act 2 and Vignettes Two vignettes out thus far, another following soon. Development of Act 2 has gone at the pace of an elderly snail, since I'm still working the ol' day job, but it's progressing. There are a few key differences between Act 1 and Act 2. The most obvious is the structure. There's a bit more freedom of movement in that locations will unlock based on what you know, and you will need to travel to these locations to progress the story. However, this means the checkpoint save system is useless, so a simple autosave is used. I'll rethink Act 1's "chapters" once it's all done. Most of the remaining mysteries are revealed in Act 2, and I am reeeeally looking forward to showing what's in store for you in Act 3! Second Artist Say hello to Iain! In order to lift some of the weight of the artwork off Josh, we're splitting art work into background art (Josh) and character art (Iain). This presents a tiny problem though. We're not using a standardised art style like anime, so there's a certain amount of art shift that can be expected. With this in mind, some of the characters in Act 1 will have to be redrawn. Some folks might be opposed to this, but ya know what - it's going to look great and allows us to put more emotional variety in the character art! Will try and show off some hopefully not too spoilerish stuff soon. In the mean time, here are some concepts as a tease.
Finally We have some music to share with you too, but will post that a bit later - stay tuned!