Hi spooky friends!

Development in August felt like a blur. I feel like I was possessed by something and when I woke up, bleary-eyed and staring upon my screen in the middle of the night, the first chapter of Winter Knight was complete.

Chapter one ended up being longer than I initially planned. The playable demo takes up a bit more than half of it, when I thought it would be more like 3/4ths. Two of the three main branches in it are complete; the third one I'll return to once the other chapters are finished since it's unlikely players will see it on a first playthrough.

Now, onto plans and progress!

Chapter Two Goals

My goal for September is to finish the character sprites + expressions and make revisions to the first part of chapter two.

The Winter Knight rework was actually started out of order: I planned the broad strokes of the story, then delved into rewriting it from the second act. This made it so that when I went back to do the first chapter, I had a crystal clear view of the events that would happen and what the player would know. I did end up changing pieces of the story when I finished chapter one, though, so I now need to edit the second act again and continue where I left off.

Chapter two is a flashback, where you'll be able to see what the castle and its inhabitants looked like while it was still populated...

The full build currently sits at 37k words, which makes it the biggest project I've coded so far by a long shot.

Music and Sound

Though it wasn't anything too crazy or complex, I had a lot of fun with dynamic music and sound in a certain sequence in the second half of chapter one, and hope I'll be able to do similar things in later sequences.

I've joked that because Nameless Knight is a suit of armour, it's been a blessing not having to draw facial expressions. That doesn't mean he isn't an expressive character, however! I put a lot of attention into how he sounds, while trying not to be too distracting (because in real life, suits of armour make a LOT of noise as they move.)

When the main character of your game is a knight...

There's also a different main BGM track for the rest of chapter one, which like the first track also has dynamic layering depending on where you are in the castle.

Art

All the backgrounds for chapter one and most of the ones for chapter two are complete now. I hope you'll enjoy walking through the castle while it was still bustling and seeing what the ruins used to be like...

The sprites that still need to be completed are the Commander's, "Sir Hero" (an older character who appears in chapter two) and a new knight sprite I can use as a base for the various NPC knights.

Here are a few more sneak peeks at chapter one:

Huh, wonder why those crates are there.

September is going to be jam-packed for Winter Knight, with festivals, events and other tasks for me on top of development, so we'll see how far I get. Hopefully I'll get to tell you about it soon!

Have a great week,

-Eli