Fixed credits scrolling background Fixed credits fading to transparency instead of black

Extras menu bugs fixed

Added Steam Achievements to the game!

End credits had a bug where it was not showing character images correctly. This has been fixed

Small update that fixes an issue with Ren'Py's "vpgrid" which was causing an error when looking at the extras and scene selection screens

Typo fix in "Masks"

Fixed Grimalkin's eye colors in the Blackguard flashback scene

Fixed small details in various CGs: - Grimalkin's eye color was blue instead of yellow - Mistslayer had an extra finger (?!!) - Sabbatical's eye colors were wrong

Forgot to update the transition to the new main menu in "RECAP" now fixed.

Hello! Catalyst Wake has finally been released on Steam! Hopefully the wait is worth it. To celebrate the occasion, I've changed the main menu one of the very few things on my list of "potential future updates". I will continue to support Catalyst Wake with bug fixes and additional features after release. Be sure to let me know if you run into any issues. I know some Mac users were having difficulties my hope was that by upgrading my computer to Catalina, it would fix that issue, and the game runs fine for me, but I do not know yet if it was resolved for anyone experiencing those problems. I hope you enjoy the game! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see more about upcoming games.

Catalyst Wake has been finished, and is now available to play on itch.io! It will be coming to Steam on February 10th. Obviously I can't link to the itch page from Steam, since it's against Steam's policies. But I suspect that doesn't matter, since if you're reading this progress update here, you probably prefer to to wait to play it on Steam anyway. Now that The Evolving World and Pageturner are done, it really feels like the proper end to my Scratch era. But I'll be making one final Games Update on Scratch to truly cap it off and I just might sneak a few exclusive surprises in there! Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates.

We're one day away from Catalyst Wake's release!! Just in case you didn't know this already, the game will be coming to Steam on February 10th next year, but is releasing on itch.io tomorrow. This is because the end of the year is a bad time to release games on Steam. The past week has been a lot of work. It took me about three full days to compose the music, two full days to do all the sound effects... and I'm still working on putting in the voices. Hoping to finish that up tomorrow morning at the latest. But yes, things are getting very tight as I reach the end here. I will go into more detail about what I'm going to patch in after release it's nothing monumental, but you know me, I like to have tons of behind the scenes and other extra content. Well, I've got to get back to work now... you'll hear from me again tomorrow! Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Patreon to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

I completed 115 CGs this week, bringing the total CGs in Masks to 558.
And with that, every CG in Catalyst Wake has been completed!! Even though I won't have time to extend the Summit fight sequence, I do want to go back in and revise some CGs I made. And I haven't post-processed or implemented them yet. But I'm planning to finish all of that today. So even though I'm TECHNICALLY still not done with the CGs, I'm like 99.9% done, so good enough, right? I think I've made 115 CGs in a week before, however this time I set all the scenes up beforehand, and then cranked out 30 CGs per day for three days, on the 19th, 20th and 22nd. It's the most CGs I've made within a four day period, which is a bit of a stretch for a personal record but whatever. I'm so relieved I won't have to do that again, my hand definitely started to hurt a bit. Even though Masks has so many CGs, I'm very curious to find out if it actually ends up being longer than Mist. There's so many action scenes (which go by fast) that it may end up being the same in length. And how long does it take to play all the parts? I'm guessing about an hour, but we'll see! Well, I have a lot of composing to do. If everything goes as planned, the next update will be the one where I finally release Catalyst Wake. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Patreon to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

I completed 48 CGs this week, bringing the total CGs in Masks to 399! However, 27 of those CGs were only used on one particular shot. It's so many frames it's practically an animation, and took me about four days to complete. Once the game is out, you'll see why all that effort was needed, but it definitely slowed me down this week. It's why I was calling it the most difficult scene I had left.
I don't have much time before my deadline only 15 days. It's also a super busy time of the year. That's why I'm going into Turbo Mode. I have four scenes left to complete, and though they each have their individual challenges, I'm hoping to finish them this week.
I've created this helpful Venn diagram. As it illustrates, Set-Ups are the "true bottleneck" the most difficult and time-consuming part of the CG-making process. "Set-Ups" are the catch-all term I use to describe the process of posing the characters, adjusting the camera angle for each cut, and rendering out the three passes. It also may involve additional modeling or textures if there are environmental elements or props in the scene. Because of this, I'm doing them first. So I'll set up the four remaining scenes all in a row, then proceed to the lineart phase afterwards. But even if I manage to complete all these scenes in a week, that still only leaves me about seven days to do all the remaining music, sound effects, and voices, which isn't ideal. However, the pressure of this deadline is likely going to make it possible. You may be wondering, wait a minute, this deadline is totally arbitrary and has already been changed many times why is it so important to release the game then? Well, after I finished the demo and set this aside to work on my 10 year presentation, I lost a lot of the sense of urgency to get the project done. There were a few weeks where I'd planned to work on it, but ended up barely working on it at all. The fact that "2021" is in the trailer is a good excuse to really nail in this deadline and say "This is it". Yes, I could easily update the trailer with "2022", and push back the deadline again, and it would probably be healthier. But that urgency would go away. The other thing, which may be more relevant, is that if I have to push Catalyst Wake into 2022, it'll begin to overlap with the project I'm doing for this filmmaking class in January, and I'll likely be forced to set it aside for several months. I made a commitment to myself spend less time on each project. I want to be releasing multiple things per year, even if that's sometimes hard to pull off. Looking at the big picture, one project that keeps holding up the others is destined to either be set aside or worse, cancelled, as has happened in the past. I want to be able to move on to my other projects, because there are so many exciting things I can't wait to make. So, it's unfortunate, but pushing myself into overdrive sometimes is necessary. I will say this Methods was a lot trickier to pull off because I had a weekly deadline and Catalyst Wake has been a much healthier experience overall. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Patreon to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

Ahhh the end is in sight!! I can feel it! This past week, I concentrated on the hardest scenes first. I'm currently halfway through what I've determined is the most difficult scene. I have four scenes left to complete after this one!! I completed 37 CGs this week, bringing the total CGs in Masks to 351.
I can definitely finish all the CGs this month. The question will be, can I implement the music, sound effects, voices, and extra content in the remaining time? It's true that the bottleneck is the CGs and mostly everything else takes less time, but it will probably involve some crunch. At least I'm not exploiting any employees of mine... right...? haha ha ha...... What I'm really looking forward to is the week after I release it, where I'll feel a huge rush of motivation. I'm hoping to put in all the stuff I couldn't get to before release into that week. If worse comes to worst, I will have to release it without any extra content. But no matter what, my deadline is set in stone at this point. I really don't want to have to change the date displayed in the trailer. Anyway, one really useful thing I've done is block Twitter. Sorry if I don't see any messages right away. I will only unblock Twitter for days like today where I need to post there. So far I think it's really helped me be more productive, should've done it way sooner. And thank you to everyone who's joined the Discord. I'm glad it's not just me in there, that would be sad. I will be able to put more attention there after this month of crunch. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Patreon to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

Well after last week's somewhat depressing post, here's a much more exciting one! I completed 54 CGs this week, bringing the total CGs in Masks to 314.
Of course, because I did the action scenes first, it doesn't take nearly as long to play as the other two yet, despite having almost as many CGs. I will be continuing to work on the trickiest scenes first, and saving the easy scenes for the end of the month. These next two weeks will be super busy, because I'm going to really try to get the rest of the CGs done with a 2 week buffer for my release date. In other news, I have switched from Buy Me a Coffee to Patreon. Posting on BMC every week was a good exercise, and now I'm confident I'll be able to consistently upload stuff. I'm also launching the official LockedOn Games discord tomorrow. I've gotten requests for one for a while, and I was hesitant because I didn't want it to take up too much of my time. But on the other hand, it's a better use of my time than browsing Twitter which is my number one distraction. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Patreon to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

This past week, I had a somewhat sobering conversation with a marketing professional about Catalyst Wake. But it was also really helpful. I've thought about some things, and I'm going to make some adjustments to the release schedule more on that later. First of all, I'm pretty surprised to have been approached by any marketing people at all, and they did so because they liked the look of the game, so that's very flattering. But of course, the amount of wishlists this game has (around 500) makes marketing it a super risky move. Wishlists are the most reliable way to determine if a game will do well on Steam, and the more you have, the better.
I launched my store page early for precisely that reason, it's a common indie dev tactic because theoretically the longer it's up, the more wishlists you accumulate. But when it comes to other things, I'm not so savvy. For example, they pointed out that my store page header lacked contrast and clarity, which is why I switched it out this week.
I used Thumblytics, a site built for YouTube videos, to sneakily do A/B testing for Catalyst Wake's new store page header. When I pitch this game to interested parties, I can't help mentioning how little I expect it to succeed in the traditional sense. That is the most honest assessment in my opinion. I follow the philosophy of "make things for yourself". I didn't set out to make a project that would necessarily be accessible or interesting to anyone but me. It appears I'm taking a huge gamble by basing this on my old animations which almost nobody has watched and my excitement for this largely relies on my own nostalgia for my old project, which a very small percentage of even my own fanbase feels. And now we come to the sabotage angle. It was brought to my attention that my new planned release date of December 30th is one of the worst times you can release a game. By launching during the holidays, I would basically be sabotaging my game's chances to make any profit during its first week (first week profits are super important for Steam's metrics). I had a difficult choice to make. On one hand, it would be nice not to kneecap my own project and make sure it has the best shot in the market. On the other as I've established, I'm not exactly expecting big profits from this. I don't think I'll be able to break even. The real success will be finally finishing The Evolving World's story, learning the things that I did from this project, and getting to move on to my other projects. That has always been my personal metric for success. So what I've come up with is a compromise. I don't like the idea of sitting around on a finished game. Therefore, I will still be releasing Catalyst Wake on December 30th on itch.io. However, it will be coming to Steam on February 10th. This is a lot like how my other games were released anyway, and it will be good to get feedback and iron bugs out before it's exposed to a wider audience. It's too bad because I really wanted to be able to deliver it on all platforms at once, but it's my own fault for taking so long and procrastinating this much. I hope you can understand. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Buy Me a Coffee to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

This past week, I finally reached the 1000 CG milestone. To be more specific, there are now 1012 CGs in Catalyst Wake. Now, quantity isn't an indication of quality by any means. However, when I started this project, I wanted to make a rather high number of CGs, and in the back of my mind, the 1000 CG goal was always something I wanted to hit. Mist contains 385 CGs, Summit contains 346 CGs, and so far Masks contains 267 CGs. I would've reached it sooner, but I've been procrastinating a lot ever since completing the Final Battle scene. We're less than 12 days away from December. I haven't stayed on task, but I'm really hoping that will change in the last stretch and it probably will! If I know anything about myself it's that the beginning and end of a project are always the most productive. It's that middle slog which is ALWAYS longer than you think it will be that's the tricky part. If worse comes to worst, I can always release the game without the extra content, and patch it in later. Which is pretty likely, considering sound, voices, and music will take me two weeks at least. This past week, I finished the set-ups and sketches for a little 15 CG scene. Unfortunately that's all I got done. However, I'm determined to do much more in this final 12 days of November another intensive that will get me much closer to my goal. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Buy Me a Coffee to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

Hello again! I'm back at it with the CGs again, currently working on the first scene in Masks. It's a big relief that I already finished the biggest scene, as the other scenes aren't nearly as long, and as I complete more and more of them, I'm hoping that will create a "motivation snowball" effect as each one becomes easier to make. There are some particularly interesting scenes in Masks that I can't wait to make, but this first scene is a "walking and talking" scene. Talking scenes are usually a bit tedious to make, but at least they're easy. "Walking and talking" scenes are tedious and difficult, because you have to move the characters through the environment as they're talking so reposing legs, and moving cameras. Fortunately, I'm almost done with this first scene, which will be 53 CGs sending me over my 1000 CG goal! After lots of procrastinating, I'm finally "waking up" and getting work done. This week, I'm finishing this scene, and hopefully the one after, since it's short. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Buy Me a Coffee to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

Well, I'm about halfway through creating all the backgrounds I need. I also spent some time in the first part of the week working on another scene, which means Masks now has three scenes complete, out of twelve. The longest scene may be done, but I suspect it will take at least a month to draw the remaining CGs, even if all the backgrounds were done. It's a good thing I moved that release date! In other news, I recently decided to enroll in a 15-week online course that starts next year. I joined it totally on a whim, but I think it will be an extremely helpful experience. The course mostly focuses on boarding and storytelling. As I continue to make more projects like Catalyst Wake, which is basically just a super polished storyboard, boarding will become much more of a major part of my workflow. In future projects, I'll need to improve on the acting and expressions, since the characters aren't wearing masks it's better to rip off the band-aid and start doing that now. So will taking this class impact the development of my other projects? Yes, most likely. However, I plan to work on Broken Spirits simultaneously, to an extent. There are still a few mysteries for me to outline, which I'd like to finish before I go into production on it. I actually scrapped one of the mysteries I'd written previously and plan to completely redo it. I just want to be sure I don't run into a writer's block during production. Obviously, I will have more information on when I'll be starting production on Broken Spirits, when Phantom Limb will be out, and what the project I'll be creating for this class is next year. For now, my work on Catalyst Wake continues. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Buy Me a Coffee to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

The Final Battle Gauntlet is now over. Yesterday, I finally completed the "Final Battle" sequence that I'd started working on mid-September. It contains 214 CGs and took 27 days to complete, when I account for the days that I was unable to work on it for various reasons. As usual, I underestimated how many CGs it would be, and how many I could make consecutively. The next time I do a gauntlet, which will be pretty soon, I'll make sure to plan for just a week of dedicated work. It's a lot easier to work really intensely for a short time than to try to stretch out that intensity to a full month. I'm only 50 CGs away from 1000 CGs in total for all three sequels, and it looks like I'll definitely go beyond that. That was one of my secret goals for this project, and it'll be super exciting to reach it! While I'm still sure I'll be able to release Catalyst Wake this year, I keep having to push back the release date. Now it's looking more and more like I'll have to release it in late December, which would bump Phantom Limb into 2022. That's probably for the best, but it still bums me out a bit that I was so off the mark with my optimistic release date predictions. This week, I'll be working on the backgrounds I need to complete all the other scenes in Masks. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Buy Me a Coffee to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

I'm posting this at night because, as you may have guessed, I was making CGs all day and didn't want to kill my momentum. But yes, I am still not finished with this scene! Right now I'm busy rendering out the backgrounds, which is a delicate operation so I can't set up more shots, but I strategically hit that render button right after prepping a batch of around 34 CGs. Since my computer can handle running Cheetah3D and Animate at the same time, I'm able to finish those CGs while it renders out the backgrounds. I'm less worn out than I was last week, surprisingly. I guess my brain has readjusted to this. For a while I was worried because I was really struggling to meet the daily goal. But I get something done every single day, and bit by bit, I've climbed back on top of it. In any case, after I finish this scene I'll be shifting back to backgrounds to give myself a breather, but then the CG journey will resume once more. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Buy Me a Coffee to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

So, after another week of CGs, it seems I was right on the money with my estimate last week. It will probably take another week to finish the final third of this scene. And remember that this is just one scene albeit the longest one. And speaking of how short the game is, that's been on my mind as well, in terms of how to price it. This past week I ran a small poll on Twitter asking people's opinions on how it should be priced. It basically sums up my dilemma.
The votes are perfectly split between $7 and $10 the two prices that I've been going back and forth on myself. I'm someone who overthinks the price of my games maybe a bit more than I should. I tend towards undervaluing my games, and Methods' $20 price was sort of an experiment, to force myself out of that mindset. Steam's cut, taxes, currency conversions, and how you make the majority of your earnings during sales are my main reasons for considering $10. But when I think about the length of the game and the amount of content, I do feel that $7 is more fair for what you're getting. Right now I'm leaning more towards $7, but I'll probably keep going back and forth up until it's finally released. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Buy Me a Coffee to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

Well I'm halfway through the gauntlet but there's some news! Turns out I underestimated how many CGs this final battle scene would be. Honestly I think it's a good thing, because I really want to make sure this last big fight packs a punch and it doesn't feel too insubstantial. That's how you get rushed battles like Part 4's. But it does mean that I'll have to keep the gauntlet going for longer than two weeks. You know how I previously showed how I plotted out what CGs I wanted by writing little comments in the script? Sometimes it's hard for me to imagine how many CGs it will take to convey an action. That's what screwed me up here I would put down a note for a CG of "Oliver jumping", for example, and then when it came time to make it, I realized I needed "jump", "mid-air", and "landing" CGs to fully convey the action. This would be avoided if I thumb-nailed what CGs I wanted beforehand. Oh well. I have 66 CGs completed so far (I started on Thursday and spent the whole week trying and failing to do 24 CGs in one day to make up for that). I estimate that I'm only a third of the way through the scene. Until next time! LockedOn. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Support me on Buy Me a Coffee to unlock exclusive images from the upcoming chapters of Catalyst Wake. I post something there every week.

I spent the past week modeling environments for Masks, with a focus on getting the environment done for this really long scene the longest scene in Catalyst Wake. For clarity purposes, I'll call it the "final battle scene" for now. Not all the environments are done yet, but the ones I worked on this week were the most challenging ones. I'm going to try tackling the final battle scene first, and my plan is to create around 12 CGs a day for two weeks straight to finish it. I'm calling this type of marathon I do a "gauntlet" because... it sounds cool. But also, a gauntlet is a challenge that you do in a public space, in a manner of speaking. Because I'm announcing that I'm going to do this publicly, it helps with my motivation to follow through on it I think. In other news, I've been experimenting with AI tools to help enhance textures recently! Topaz AI has a great suite of various photography AIs. The one that's been the most helpful for me is Gigapixel AI which increases the resolution of the image. Like most 3d artists, I use a lot of textures from Textures.com. But they don't always have a large resolution available. I've been trying to get around some of the issues with low res textures by trying to make procedural textures with Cheetah3D's node-based texturing system. However, it's not always ideal and I'm not very skilled at that. The AI solution has been more reliable and gets really good results most of the time. I'm excited about the future applications of AI in art and I'll definitely be making use of it as it becomes more accessible! You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Until next time! LockedOn.

Production has officially begun on Masks! This week, I completed the first scene, but more importantly, I completed several new models that I'll need for the coming scenes. I also made notes of the CGs I'd need for the scenes in Masks the first step in creating a scene. It looks like this:
Instead of sketching out thumbnails of the angles I want, or making a storyboard, I write down a brief description of the angle I want right there in the script. Then I go straight from that to setting up the shots in 3D. It's a little easier for me to remember what the characters are saying and what they need to do if it's written directly in the script, and it saves me a bit of time. There are a lot of new backgrounds I'll need to complete Masks, and I'm going to start working on that during the next week. There's a big scene with 170 CGs, and I'm hoping to complete that this month by doing a CG marathon just like the one I did to finish the Mechora Factory scene in Mist. I think I'm getting back more of my motivation for this project. I also figured out how I want to rework the fight scene from Summit that I was talking about last week. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. Until next time! LockedOn.

The music for Summit is now complete! However, I wasn't able to complete the sound effects or implement VO. I kept thinking "Oh, it won't take very long so I have time" and then I suddenly didn't have time anymore. But it's okay, the truth is, sound and VO doesn't take a long time to implement, I just need to light a fire under my seat to get it done, so to speak. Much like writing, some things are just harder to motivate myself to do. Unfortunately, after playing through all of Summit, I've realized that a particular fight scene is too short and not as impactful as I want it to be. What's there is serviceable and gets the characters from A to B, but ideally I would add 30-50 CGs to extend the sequence. For now, I'm going to press forward with the CGs for Masks because CGs are my top priority, and try to implement sound and VO for Summit at the same time. Then, once Masks is complete, I'll revisit that scene in Summit. You can visit www.lockedongames.com to see a backlog of progress updates. I'll be reposting the progress updates here on Steam as well from now on. Until next time! LockedOn.