Hi there,

Just dropping in here to do a small development update.

As of today, a big milestone has been met, this being the whole overworld being implemented, which doesn't mean it's been finished, but it's now possible to explore the whole world of the game.

This was the milestone I was dreading the most because I don't really like decorating rooms, placing all the flowers, grass and what not, so me being done with that is a relief, and also a huge step towards the completion of the game.

There are only 4 milestones left for the game, which I will list:

1. Populate the overworld.
2. Design, implement and lock in the final 100 challenge rooms of the game.
3. Make the game playable from beginning to end.
4. Finish any other secrets, secondary stories and extra stuff.

Alongside these 4 milestones, stands another single parallel milestone to them, this being making the music for everything, but I won't comment on this one as it's just, making music as the game advances.

So yeah, there's still a lot of work to do, let me try to break down everything a bit more.

When talking about populating the world, I mean drawing the buildings, NPCs, giving them dialogue, and implementing any overworld gimmicks.

This is subdivided into (currently) 22 individual tasks, which can then contain 1 or more things to do. For example, one task may be, draw every house and NPC for a town. Or one task may be, draw this one specific thing for this specific map of the overworld.

I don't think this milestone will take too long, maybe I can have it done before christmas, but again, and as always, I won't promise anything.

The second milestone is self explainatory, there needs to be 100 challenge rooms in the game, so I need to make them.

Luckily, I already have more than 30 made because of the 2 sets of rooms I made for the demo, however, some of them are being scratched because I don't think they fit the game, or are simply badly designed, like the wind cave, or the switch puzzle in the waterways. They've already been updated in the demo.

I have to go through the ones I have and decide how many of them are fit for the final release, and if I can fix any of the ones I don't think fit, and then design or implement the rest.

This may include implementing new mechanics for the rooms, but yeah, that's usually easy to do. Or has been up until now at least.

This milestone will take a lot of time, mainly because I'll have to decorate every challenge room with the flowers, grass, or other decorations in case they are in another area. But I don't think it will take as long as finishing the overworld took.

Making the game playable from beginning to the end is the easiest milestone of them all, since all it is, is implement cutscenes and dialogues that are already written. So it will probably take less than two weeks when the time comes.

And the final milestone, could prove to be either short, or long.

To be honest, I have a lot of ideas of things to add as extra, and I could take my time and add them, or I could say screw it, let's release it already.

It will depend on me, specially if I get into the more in depth ideas I have.

Can't honestly really comment on how long it could take. But since it's just extra things that should be ""easy"" to implement, I think at most I could spend the same time I spend with the challenge rooms if I decide to go all in and implement all the extra ideas I have.

So yeah, there's still a lot of work to do, but the pace is constant and the goal is in sight.

I'll do another update whenever I finish a milestone.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a nice day!