July 5 Update (Patreon)

With the TLS update released, I am suddenly seized by motivation to work on OEA. Considering that inspiration to work on certain things (like UI or animations) comes along rarely, best to do it now while it's fun instead of forcing it later. I don't know if this one will go to release anytime soon, but it should definitely take a major step forward over the next week.

This project has been a WIP for... 3.5 years? That actually surprises me, but I just checked the initial payment. For the vast majority of that time, I knew that it was a far future release because it would simply take so much time for Crescentia to finish drawing all the scenes. But she's now 100% done, so further delays are ones that I choose.

(That's not completely true. I still need NPC faces, and the artist for those is working inconsistently. The pixel artist for the battlers has work yet to do. There are a couple major programming issues. I intend to commission more complex parallaxed maps. But those are mostly sundry assets, so moving things forward is still on me.)

My plans for the next step have shifted. Originally my goal was that version 0.3.0 would be a simple update finishing the plot and gameplay, without many visual improvements. Then 0.4.0 would overhaul major parts of the game, invalidate previous saves, and so on. After maybe a version 0.5.0 at some point, we'd move on to 1.0.0 in fairly few iterations.

That isn't going to happen. I've been focusing all my gameplay energy on TLS, plus there are a few stumbling blocks with the combat, plus my inspiration went in another direction. So I've been putting a lot of time into improvements intended for 0.4.0, while the final content is finished but not really tested.

One piece of that is the new title screen, the video of which you've probably seen above. This one is... hopefully fancier. =/ Since I spent so much on the art, I'm really trying for the production values of this one, which means that there are dozens of little things to do. I'm not sure if they'll make a difference, but I'm giving this my best shot!

I have a big list of things to do: some low hanging fruit, some involved, some relying on things I don't have. By next week I should have burned through a lot of the list and hopefully I'll have a clearer idea about the major roadblocks or chunks of work that remain.