SLARPG: General update November 2020 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! We've made very good progress this month! It feels like every day now the game is shaping up more and more.

Last month, I explained that we were nearing completion on the second major NPC settlement in the game. I'm pleased to report that we're now DONE with everything that needs to be done for this area for our current development milestone! All the NPCs are in place with their dialogue, all the art is done, some fun new gear has been added to the shops, and the big story scenes with bespoke sprite work (like the Higgledy Piggledy's scene in the demo) are done. This is very exciting!

On top of that, the desert is also nearly complete! This is a big deal for me since I've been working on the Celestial Wasteland on and off since early in development. It's a big area--one of the biggest in the game. At this point, all that's left for me to do is finalize the combat. Figuring out where all the enemies go, balancing them, finalizing their behavior, that sort of thing. Judging from how development on the previous areas went, this should take no time at all.

Here, have a new screenshot with all the spoilers censored:

With that, I've moved on to the second dungeon in the game: the Neon Labyrinth. I've shared screenshots of this area before (like the one below) and it appeared way back in the first trailer, so it should be no surprise that a lot of the work on this area is already done. It has its tileset, it has several completed rooms, it has a majority of its enemies, it has music, and the big story scenes have already been written. I'm cautiously optimistic about my ability to finish the dungeon in the coming weeks. And once that's done, the climax of Act II of the story will be in the bag.

Because progress has been so steady lately, my current goal is to have a new internal build of the entire first half of the game done by the end of the year for private friends and family playtesting. (Emphasis on "private." I want to reiterate that I am not releasing anything new publicly or through Patreon until the whole game is done.) A lot of life events got in the way of development this year, but having the whole first half of the story playable from start to finish with nearly all of the content in place will be a huge, huge, HUGE milestone for us after all the work we've done. This internal build of the first half alone will likely be about as long as I originally expected the entire game to be. Ideally, I'd like to be done before Christmas/my birthday so I can enjoy the holiday in peace, but if not then I'm optimistic about getting everything done shortly afterwards.

After that we will, of course, be moving on to new areas and new parts of the story in the new year. A good deal of work has already been done on the second half of the game (again, I don't want "the first half of the game is playable" to be interpreted as "only half of the work is done"--we're well past that point), and we're looking forward to filling it all out and getting more of it playable.

As always, thank you for your continued support, and have a safe holiday season!