October 2023 Progress Update - WORLD ENDS WEDNESDAY

First, we would like to thank everyone that has supported the reveal of our game last month! It has meant a lot!

Our team has been working on a lot of the core elements of the game over this past summer, and we are nearing a point where the core mechanics we are going to use throughout the entire game are complete. It might not be for a bit longer that we can show more of these mechanics in action, but the game is coming together super nicely!

COMBAT A big focus has been on the combat of our game. Our goal from the start was to create an RPG battle system inspired by the Mario and Luigi games. For those unfamiliar, the Mario and Luigi games use command inputs to deal more damage to enemies in their turn based battle system. They also have team up attacks that will include the two party members doing a special attack. Our game is planning to do something similar but with a twist… but I would like to hold off talking about that until we can show it in action. We are hoping to be able to show off more of the battle system at some point this month. For now, we are working on the simple attacks and trying to polish up some basic animations first. Here is an early animation of Hazel’s tail attack.

PROGRESS Next, I would like to touch on progress completion rates of Chapter 1. ➤Programming: 70% ➤Art: 35% ➤Audio: 0% ➤World Design: 60% (A big section of the chapter is still being worked on) ➤Writing: 80% Main Story / 5% Side Content

Our team has been working really hard to finish Chapter 1, as this is the first big checkpoint for us in development. Once we have the groundwork to go off of, we will be able to complete chapters significantly faster. We have the entire plot of the game written already, so we are all really excited to reach the point of being able to work on some of the later chapters of the game. The final game is going to have 7 chapters total.

As I mentioned in the world design, we are working on the biggest section of Chapter 1 right now. This might be the hardest part of this entire chapter to make, but I have confidence that I will be able to complete it within a reasonable amount of time. We have the section mapped out, we just need to actually implement it into the game.

Something I would like to be upfront about is that our team is not a full time game dev team. Many of us are college students. Some of us work jobs. The most unfortunate of us all do both. It is quite tough to get progress done super quickly with these massive time sinks in our lives, but we are all still dedicated to making the time and continuing to make consistent progress on the game. We have a timeline of when we expect things to be completed, but a lot of these factors have thrown up unexpected delays in the past, and I am sure they will continue to in the future. For that reason, we are holding off on talking about any release plans for the time being. Once we reach closer to 90% completion of Chapter 1, we will then talk more about our plans for the future.

That is all for this month’s WORLD ENDS WEDNESDAY progress update! I am not sure if I am going to do these monthly or not yet, but we will see!