As if it came from HorrorVale itself, long dead Progress Report has risen from the grave for July.

Hello. Been a while. 

Also probably a bit unexpected considering the last report was called "The Final Report"?

However, given the close proximity of the release date and certain circumstances, we thought it might be a good idea to make a new one!

If you've been looking at our monthly reports (and progress bars), you'll notice we've been working on "Final Boss & Ending" since March. 

One reason we wanted to make this report is that we wanted to kind of go over what that actually means, because you might be thinking "Why is it taking so long to put together a fight, ending, and credits"?

However, that's not exactly what that bar entails in its entirety. 

Leading up to the Final Boss is several entire gameplay segments including new enemies, new bosses, and a TON of cutscenes, several of which are hand-drawn. There's one hand-drawn cutscene that lasts over 4 minutes for instance. You know... The kind of cutscenes like when Grave Hands falls into the abyss or Alice changes into her witch outfit at the start of the game. Except with 70+ images instead of 5. 

For the purposes of an example, let's look at "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess", if you've played that game, you might remember that "The City in the Sky" is the "Final Dungeon", but after that you don't immediately go to fight the final boss, you instead go through two more shorter dungeons, fight a boss in one, and then fight the final boss which has multiple stages. It's... Kind of like that? 

In truth, we only just started the ACTUAL "Final Boss", this month. All the work on this part of the game for the past few months has been spent on everything leading up to it. And unlike most enemies in the game, which kind of bob around, this one is fully hand animated, and has custom animations for all of its attacks. So, it's not been that simple. 

Thankfully though, we're finally nearing the end of it all. All the art assets for the final boss are complete. There's several more cutscenes to put together, including the game's ending, the credits/epilogue, and then that's it for this bar. So it seems like that could happen in the next few weeks.

Now, you might be looking at these bars, and thinking "How is this game going to come out in a little over 2 months!?"

Well.

We are also kind of nervous about that, but for now there is no announcement of a delay.

We've decided that we'll continue on undeterred until the end of August. 

"For myself, I plan on taking a week off of my regular job in August to crunch as hard and as much as possible. That's a thing normal game devs do, right? Just me, I mean. Not my team. Crunching a dev team is bad." -Dustin

Anyways, because of that, we'll be able to come to a real decision regarding our release dates status at the end of August. 

We also want to ensure that the game has proper time for testing and balancing, so there's a real possibility that even if we complete the game in time, it could get delayed anyway. By how much depends entirely on how much we have done by the end of August. 

And in case you haven't read previous reports, let's briefly go over what "testing and balancing" entails. 

You might assume this means that we've not tested a single thing this entire time, but that's not what it means. We've been testing the game as we go, squashing the biggest and most obvious bugs, but it's very difficult to really get a good picture of how everything works together as a cohesive experience when you're testing parts of the game in chunks, not to mention how new bugs can appear over time in old areas. It's also very difficult to determine the difficulty without being able to play the full game and also experience all of its content. Not to mention how varied the experience can be based off of how many Party Members you recruit, which ones you use, and how many Sidequests you've done. We're going to be particularly looking at how the experience feels for someone who 100%s the game, someone who only does the bare minimum, and how it feels for someone who is somewhere inbetween (which is the average player). In the ideal scenario, those experiences aren't drastically different. Only a little bit. 

So that being said, a lot of time is required to do this. This is a 30-40 hour game that we'll need to play through multiple times to get right. 

Best case scenario, It gets delayed till later in October.

Worst case scenario, early next year. 

Again, more to say about that in the Next Progress Report.

The Void Awaits...

Original Post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/86977418