Updates on progress for the game and demo

Hi everyone!

First of all, thank you for the ongoing support on a game that doesn't even have a demo yet. It motivates me to know that people are able to see the vision for the game even without being able to play it.

In my last post, I said that I was working on a demo and that it would take about 1 to 2 months, BUT in a classic game developer move, I overscoped things, and the demo is taking a little longer to make than expected (I think at this point it has been about 3 to 4 months). HOWEVER, I want to assure everyone that I'm still working on it.

The biggest hurdle currently is the writing. Because I consider it such a central piece of the game, I have focused a lot of my time on making it the best I can. Another not-so-well-thought-out aspect of my original timeframe was the exponential amount of text that branching paths add to the writing. It feels like I have written a dozen different games due to these "branching". As a product of wanting to have meaningful decisions, currently i have 5 "early endings" and about 5 "final endings." This means that, depending on your decisions, the game can end before the two weeks are up in 5 different ways, and in another 5 different ways if you reach the last day.

I didn't actually try to make this many endings just to boast about having "content." It was a genuine outcome of me just writing and creating decisions that I thought people would logically want to make, and exploring how those decisions would impact the storyline as a whole. However, I have finally finished the core dialogue for the main characters throughout the two weeks, as well as all the substorylines. Now I just have to import everything into the engine and build the interactions, which will hopefully speed up development.

Because I have already failed to give a good estimation, I feel compelled not to do it again. BUT, I will do it regardless to pressure myself into working harder. I will release the demo in 2 months MAX, especially since I don't really have the free time in my life to maintain a longer timeline. Hopefully, due to the practice and foundation built during the demo, the main game will take less time to make than the demo did!

TL;DR: A lot of writing, overscoped branching paths, but it should take me no more than 2 months to finish the demo.

Lastly, the game was accepted into the Cyberpunk festival on Steam (among a couple of other small festivals lately). I believe this is due to your support with the wishlists, for which I thank you immensely.

Thank you for your patience and support 🙇

Some work in progress things:

Some WIP of new characters for the demo, as an Easter egg of knowledge, the left character original uniform insignia didn't had the "A" at the end of "SSA", which was changed after I goggled it lol. Steam post image

A custom made plugin for obsidian to build and keep track of dialogues ramifications and events. This is for 1 character in the first encounter with them, out 7 encounters total for the demo, just for this one character. Steam post image