Catherine and the Spirit World

Well, it's been about six months, and the game is really coming together. The scope has increased a bit, as scope is wont to do, but I believe it is still pretty manageable. Final game should end up being in the 4-6 hour range I believe. I was aiming to get this done by the end of June, though it might take a bit longer than that.



Maps
I now have... hmm, about 50-60% of the maps done for the main story? Map design has definitely been the most time-consuming part of this whole project, which makes sense in retrospect, but I don't know if that would've been my guess going into it!



Gameplay
Finally after many months I finally cracked the code for how I want to make the gameplay work. There are no random encounters, no leveling up, and no money. It has ended up being a kind of strange RPG/puzzle hybrid where you can solve puzzles by pushing things around, but also you can fight certain puzzle elements to remove them from the map, which is necessary to pass certain areas.

Each dungeon is made up of several little rooms which can each be individually reset, and each dungeon area has a unique puzzle mechanic. You can fight a lot of pieces to think less about the given puzzle, but the more you remove, the more your resources are depleted before you have to fight the boss. It remains to be seen whether this will be fun to play, but I at least think it's interesting and fresh, so I think with some tweaking it will become at least a bit entertaining.



Story
To be honest, dramatic plot-writing doesn't come very easily to me. I have the plot outline for almost everything planned out, but I've been procrastinating a bit on writing most of the important plot scenes. I am hoping once I have everything else finished things will kind of start to come together, but we'll just have to wait and see, I suppose. Regardless, I hope that even if the overarching plot is a little bit silly, the game will still hold its own with the music/graphics/gameplay/dialogue/etc, which I think are mostly pretty all right.

Overall progress
On July 8, I made this chart showing my progress at the time:


Progress definitely has slowed down since then. :p But here's the chart updated for where I'm at now:


Here's to more steady progress in the year to come!

Anyway, thanks for reading! I hope you will follow the game and check it out when it gets released.