Never Ending or Beginning - Game Update #5 (State of Union Sept.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEhS9Y9HYjU

I'm alive, I'm alive, don't worry!

Been cruising silent for the last few weeks as I've been getting my head down munching through the art for the latest update. All willing there are just some last assets to do to be polished off this week, then an intense week of transcribing the text over to Ren'Py, editing it for quality and assigning what sounds and music I need to to get it released this month.

Anyway, what to talk about? Let's start at the top...

Thrallworks

At this point I've spent well over a hundred hours on Part 2 of this between writing, editing, game-design work and art...and truthfully folks, I think I've approached this the wrong way for the most part. More specifically I've been treating it like a comic, and been doing too many single-image images that I don't actually, currently have time to do a ton of, when I should have been working on fewer, more reuseable assets. Chalk it up to experience.

It also doesn't help that most of the content you won't see in just one playthrough, but hey, people wanted their choices to matter, didn't they? And so they shall! Though this can mean, depending on the route, you might find shockingly little content for the time...but one has to think in terms of the player, and the player might want- in the final demo- to skip right past all of this and into Part 3. And so the option will be there!

Once this is out, much like for Part 1 I'll probably spend a bit of time talking about Part 2, the intent behind it, Cerise and Keller, and what I hope the impression is of them and this kind of part of the game. Though it's definitely stretched the production of the demo to a great degree, I am very glad to have added it in, otherwise a vital chunk of what the game is about beyond the training segments would be missed out on.

In other news, the $10 peeps voted for Momo to be one of the other housedrones up to be put into your room, and so it shall be! And another vote for more options will be put up next Monday. I can't rightly add an infinity of drones or even keep pace with one added a month, so when the production gets up and running all proper-like then I may start to add or offer different things to vote on. I'll keep ya'll posted.

So, what else?

Volition

I've done some thumbnail sketches, but another project unrelated to all this stuff is currently taking up the excess creative/personal time right now, so it's dragging a little. I think I'm going to make a page or an image I can constantly update so people can keep track of the progress on Volition while it's going on in the background. Watch this space!

Sketches!

As this dearth of content has malaigned me, I reckon I'll be going back to doing sketches on the regular, just to limber up some muscles and throw more fanart and OC stuff out there. I don't imagine these will be very polished, but if something's popular I may go back and clean it up some. Movement stuff will feature quite heavily in these sketches I feel

On the Whole

I'm starting to make considerations about who and where to reach out to for assistance with either this game, or a potential future game about the Movement. Much as it pains me to say, at best I can get a full art-piece done in 3 days...4 if it's got a substantial background element in it. And that's kind-of fine for a one-man effort, but if I'd put as many hours into writing as I have for drawing for this, I feel like I'd have written out half of Ty Lee's entire tree by now, including the side-convo's with other Thrallworks staff.

So come demo launch, or just before demo-launch, I'll probably also be releasing some artwork out there to see about getting a background artist...depending on how well the demo is recieved. I mean it might all bomb or won't get traction, which kiboshes that plan early, but hope springs eternal!

I'll also be getting a new computer later this month that is several orders better than my current one. It's an investment solely for projects like this one, and I'm hoping the extra graphical power can help me do things my current computer crashes to try.

Anyway, hope you've all been well! If there're any questions, feel free to ask me below, or hop on over to my Discord and ask me there! Thank y'all for tuning in!