As the end of October draws near, and the creatures of the night arise from their tombs and hovels, the HorrorVale Progress Report rises from its grave to knock at your door.

BOO!

Hello, and welcome to the Progress Report going over work done for HorrorVale in September and October.

First off, as you can see we have modified the Final Progress bars quite a bit. 

There were several that had been full for several months, so we felt this would provide some more detail about where we're at.

Before we get into talking about the game itself though, we just want to briefly go over something that happened earlier this month. 

The full details can be found here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/unfortunate-news-90736898

But more or less, we had to make a difficult choice and had to sacrifice 30,000 potential sales for the overall health of the game's launch. 

If you've given this stuff a read and would like to Support us, there's a few ways you can do so. Obviously, there's Patreon. A lot of the rewards have steadily gone away, but it's the method that supports us the most because the cut Patreon takes from each donation is significantly smaller than the cut Steam takes from every game sale.

If you did want to support us on Steam though, you CAN buy HorrorVale there!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1114650/HorrorVale/

If you already have the game in your library from when Act 1 was free, removing it will allow you to buy it.

However, there's ways you can help us out without even spending a single dime. 

One of those is Wishlisting.

We're currently running a "Wishlist Rally" event, where if we reach certain Wishlist thresholds on Steam before the game releases, we'll commit to certain goals.

It's a single click, and completely free!

Although, if you already HAVE the game in your library from when Act 1 was free, again you can Wishlist it by removing it from your library.

We're already putting the irons in the fire for the first Wishlist goal. Allllllll the irons. 8888)

This short prequel comic will tell the tale about how Webs McGregor, the Spider Bowman first came into contact with the mysterious "Creepies" weeks before Alice ever left for school that fateful night. If you'd like to see this comic become a reality, then Wishlist HorrorVale!

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about what you're probably actually here for: Game Development!

Throughout September and October, there were two major things worked on:

-Finishing the Game's Ending

and

-Squashing Bugs & Polishing

In regards to the Game's Ending... It's complete! As of now, you can walk allll the way from Alice's house to the Final Boss, beat it, and see the game's ending. The story is complete. Next on the agenda is the credits and epilogue. We gotta see what happens after the crazy events of the story after all!

(Juno dances in the Epilogue!?)

In regards to the second thing, in early October we had 2 people play through the entire game from start to finish for the very first time to get their fresh perspective of the game, and they loved it!

But they also found a large number of bugs. Some game breaking, others minor. They also had tons of great suggestions about how things could be modified and improved. Our other regular testers have also been hard at work playing through the game again and finding even more things themselves. Because of all their hard work and the hard work of our new volunteers, we can feel very confident that HorrorVale is in a great place right now in terms of polishing. We were even able to identify a really nasty memory leak in the game and worked with our primary scripter to fix numerous performance issues resulting in the game running like smooth butter. It turns out if you played HorrorVale for a very long time the game's memory would bloat tremendously until it eventually crashes, and it was only found because the crazy people who test our game like to play it for hours and hours at a time. That's a good sign I think? 

(One tester experienced such a crash right at the tail end of the Final Boss. Talk about a buzzkill.)

Course, all of this doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet. There's still a significant chunk of game left to make. Almost all optional content. At this stage... It seems very likely HorrorVale will be done Q1 2023. (That's between January and March fyi) Although we certainly aren't releasing a new release date yet. When alllllll those bars up there fill up... Then we will. But not before.

It is again unfortunate that we had to delay the game from its original October 10th Release Date, but all the bug squashing we've done this month just affirmed that it was absolutely the right choice. 

Anyways, that's all for now! We'll see you next time. And of course....

Have a Happy Halloween!!!