August ‘25

Sometimes I get writer's block with these updates and they never get written. I write and erase and write and rewrite, and all of a sudden I find myself writing about something I did two months ago, which is even harder because my mind is trying to focus on the things I should be doing in the present! So usually, these drafts just never see the light of day. I'm trying to be patient with myself though, and be honest about this struggle, too. I want these updates to reflect the journey I've been on while developing this game, and that journey has definitely had its fair share of setbacks.

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Big news alert: the store page for this game is officially LIVE ON STEAM! CLICK HERE!!!!!!!!

Admittedly, it's still pretty barebones right now, so I'm working on making a trailer and some other assets to spruce things up in the very near future. But what's important is that I finally have a link I can throw in everybody's face and say WISHLIST NOW!!!!!!!

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Continuing from my previous update, I've been working on some new rooms and locations to incorporate into the game, and tidying up the ones I already made. Here are some early screenshots of a dining room, hallway, and kitchen.

The colors aren't final, but the kitchen should be a pretty stark contrast from the other rooms. Let me ramble for a bit about the intention behind that:

A decent number of the plays that serve as the foundation for this game's story can be boiled down to "a drama within a modern Western home", but even that leaves a lot of room for nuance. That sentence describes Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, but it also describes Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman. So my challenge is creating a single "home" environment that can somehow serve as the setting for Nora & Torvald, Willy & Linda, and everybody in between.

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Here are some updated screenshots of an area I shared in my last post. I still haven't done much furnishing, but I started tinkering around with dynamic shadows & volumetric fog, which I've been trying to use sparingly since they can both add up quickly and become taxing on the player's computer. I think this is a good use of those resources.

I know I was just stressing how much I'm designing these locations to look like settings from plays, but this one actually came from my imagination more than anything else. It's got elements from a few different plays--The Glass Menagerie, Trifles, and Woyzeck, for example--but those elements are way more metaphorical than literal. If you can figure out the relationship there, I'll be impressed with your analytical abilties.

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I've also made some more progress on the player's book menu. The main feature in the book is the story that gradually appears as you collect the pages dropped by each character during the game. Picking up the page will reveal a corresponding passage in the book that sheds more light on what just happened, and allows you to fast travel back to that moment in the story by clicking on it. The book itself is still just a static background, and I'd like to eventually replace it with something 3D, or at least something that gives the illusion of multiple pages bound within a book.

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I think that's enough for now. Another issue I have with writing these updates is I don't know when I've written too much, or too little. So I'm just going to publish what I've written here and call it a day :)

If you’re still around, here’s a bonus for you: a snippet of one of the animations I’ve been working on!

Thanks for reading!

-Tim