Hello and welcome to- Wait, is this really the first Progress Report of the year!?

Oh yeah, I guess time flies fast...

Let's go over what we worked on, month by month.

January 

For January, the focus was on completing the "Secret Bosses", of which there are 5 in the game.

These challenging optional encounters are meant to test your skills in battle and push them to their absolute limits. If you've played the "Act 1" demo and fought the Secret Boss in that before, you can kind of get an idea of what to expect.

In-fact, not long ago we actually just uploaded one of the songs for one of the se bosses on our YouTube channel!

Go give it a listen and imagine what sort of foe you might face in-game...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqJhS4dw5E

February

Moving onto February, the focus became completing Second Quests.

During February we completed Second Quests for numerous characters.

Even though Second Quests are somehow even more optional than normal Quests, we hope you'll check them out. Not only do they explore various Party Member stories at a deeper level, but you'll find yourself in even more new locations, fighting unique enemies and mini-bosses.

March

March continued on with the Second Quests as we finished more and more of them.

April

During April, all of the Second Quests for Act 3 were completed, as well as all the regular Quests in the game.

In addition to that, we made various additions and changes to how some in-game features work including the map, which now features icons that will tell you where to find important places in an area such as where to change your party, save, or where to find Jiang. You of course have to have visited the location before to see these.

On the music side of things, the Soundtrack for HorrorVale is officially complete! We're now going through the lengthy process of getting all the songs formatted and album ready post release. We're still determining whether to release the OST on the same day as the game or sometime afterwards, but it's a tremendous milestone for us! Right now the list of songs in the game is sitting at a whopping 170 tracks.

The Elephant In The Room

Naturally when reading all of this you're probably wondering more than anything else... "Well, when is this going to release!?"

Back when the game was delayed in October, we put out a rough estimate that the game might be completed in Q1 2024, and while we made it clear that wasn't set in stone, I'm sure some are disappointed to find yourself in Q2 2024 now with no HorrorVale in your hands. Unfortunately we underestimated just how much was actually required to go into these Second Quests, and personal things outside of game development reared their ugly heads for myself and Matt that significantly delayed development. We actually intending on FINISHING the game in April, but it was not to be.

So...

At this stage, it's hard to give a definitive answer of when it'll release because as we stated before, we don't want to give a new release date until all of the "content" in the game is done, and while we're so close to the end we can literally taste it, who knows what might occur to derail development further. This is the unfortunate side-effect of doing game development part time instead of full time.

We would like the game to be released in June or July. This is what we're going to work towards for now, but again this is by no means a guarantee. Who knows, maybe in the end the game will just end up getting released in October after all!?

In the meantime, our next step is to finish up the "Act 4" Second Quests, and while none of them are complete yet, we've already outlined all of them and completed a lot of the graphical assets for them.

Sometimes we wonder if we got perhaps a bit too ambitious with the amount and depth of side content in the game considering if we had dialed it down significantly the game would've already been out, but we hope the amount of HorrorVale you'll have to mess around with will make it all worth it.

As for the Optional Dungeon, while it might seem daunting seeing the bars for it as they are, development for it should go relatively quickly. The only art remaining for it are enemy sprites, and actually putting all of it together won't take long, so despite the obstacles before us, we really are right at the finish line.

The next Progress Report will happen when the game is complete, so please look forward to it.