Hello again! I know we've been extra quiet lately, but I promise it's for good reason. We've been working our hardest to make it to Pre-beta (a true Alpha build of the full game) for several months now. In the last update I said I was hoping to finish it by the end of 2016, but as they say the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
New features have been added like scripted animations to liven things up. We're finally closing in on the "point of no return" where the base of the game is being locked down, so I decided to use this time to revisit things one last time and work out some final kinks in both design and storytelling. In addition to creating new content, we've also been focused on getting rid of old baggage that isn't needed anymore (the boss jewels for example), and improving the narrative since it wasn't quite as strong as it could be. It's been a difficult balance trying to have an interesting and well-paced story, while not taking the focus away from the gameplay. We want this to feel like a classic experience, so it's taken a lot of refining to find the right amount of each ingredient.
The Keep area was improved in December with bigger enemies and revised rooms.
Experimenting with some new puzzle elements. I can't stress enough how grateful we are for your patience. It's proven to be a massive challenge designing a game that can hold up to our influences, but each day I'm surprised at just how well it's coming together. We anticipate to be done with the remaining Pre-beta tasks in the next few weeks, so we'll keep you up to date as we close in on our next milestone.

Conferences

In other news, it’s show season again, and we’re also getting ready to show off Chasm at a bunch of different press and industry events. The next ones on the docket are Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) where our marketing guy, Dan Adelman, will be showing the game in the Intel booth, and then PAX East. I haven’t had a chance to leave my dev workstation in months, so I’m really looking forward to show Chasm off to PAX East attendees. Every time someone picks up the controller and has a great time with the game, my batteries get a nice recharge, and that energy will fuel me and the rest of the team as we keep polishing away!

Bloodstained Community Podcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU6-zx2lsyU We also did an interview with the Bloodstained Community podcast, and talked about Chasm at length with them. Both Dan and I had a great time doing it, so give it a listen!