Heart of the Woods Progress Update: October 2018 (Patreon)

Hello hello!

October is already more than halfway over. Isn’t it spooky how time flies? 

So far, October is shaping up to be our most productive month EVER. I guess that’s pretty fitting, if you consider the whole ghost theme. Our internal deadline is to have a finished draft of every scene by November 15th, and Rachel and I have been cruising towards that goal pretty steadily. We’re also implementing edits as we go, although of course the bulk of that will be happening after all the initial drafts are finished. The way that it works right now is that we’re trying to finalize some of the earlier scenes into their release versions even as we’re still completing first drafts of other scenes. There are 6 chapters to HotW, plus an epilogue, so we’re trying to finish the chapters in order. About half of Chapter 1 was included in the demo, which also had a smattering of scenes from chapters 2-5. Once Chapter 1 is totally done, we’re gonna be releasing it as a beta to our $50+ Patrons - we know you’ve been waiting for something! Right now, it’s looking like that’ll be sometime in mid to late November.

Speaking of editing, our programmer, Minute, has also taken over as lead editor for HotW in order to let Ally focus fully on writing TWA. She’s going to be scripting as she edits, because she’s a superhero.

There’s only a handful of art assets left to be completed: a couple CG’s, two more character designs + sprites, and some miscellaneous expressions and accessories for some of the existing sprites. We just got drafts of a few of those things this morning, and there’s a good chance that the art will be 100% done by the time we do our new progress update.

As mentioned in the last one, we still have a couple songs that need to be composed, and we’re also going to be redoing a few of the existing tracks which were written prior to some pretty significant changes to the story, and as such don’t really fit as well anymore. We also just got a WIP of the ending theme earlier today, which is shaping up really nicely.

On top of that, there’s a handful of other things that need to be done, like putting together a trailer for the game as well as the credits video. We’ll be getting started on those things probably next month or in December.

Overall, HotW is shaping up really well, and it’s kind of crazy just how fast it’s all coming together. We can’t wait for you to play it! Hopefully you’re excited too.

We’ll have more to share in November. Until then, take care!

Josh

PS: Look forward to something spooky on Halloween 🎃