Almost there! I'm hoping to have everything done by the 6th of October. I've squashed as many bugs and imperfections as I can during the last couple of weeks and just waiting on my testers final reports.

I'm actually surprised by the super positive feedback so far. Replaying and testing the same game day in, day out is a little grating but having feedback from fresh eyes is very inspiring.

Even though the game will be finished on the 6th. I'm still sticking towards the November release date, just so I can concentrate on marketing for the next month.

On another note. With help from orochii, Ancurio and Roza, the project is now running on mkxp-z. With zero lag, zero screen tear, adjustable window and 60fps, the game plays and feels totally different.

The main pro of the change is that combat feels snappier and responsive. However there was a slight negative with regards to the music timings being off. Rpgmaker xp had a slight freeze when a bgm came on and I originally adjusted certain sequences around the subsequent engine handicap. So in response I had to replay the game and rejig the timings to accommodate the changes.

Final note. Should I go DRM or DRM-Free?

Unfortunately I had to do a three month delay. Real life work and house move showed up at the wrong time. Here's the second trailer though :D

May the season bring peace, love, and joy to you and your family.

After several years of development hell, there looks like a light at the end of the tunnel. Here’s the first trailer for Cover Your Eyes with a release date of sorts.




Wishlist on steam and possibly a reweet over on twitter.


So, what happened?

To put it simply, I kinda gave up on my dreams and lost motivation. The project was most active between 2012 till early 2015, with the whole of 2017 consisting of 10 minutes’ worth of work. The game was playable from beginning till end, but I kid you not. It was the biggest load of laggy, incoherent broken trash I’d ever created. Couldn’t even figure out how to create a melee option for the player. The final nail in the coffin was a dreadful animation frame hiccup where it would revert from the player firing their weapon straight into a running animation for a split second.
Spent many months trying to fix it and out of pure frustration, I ended up putting the game on ice.


But you can never get rid of that creative itch…


February 2019 and I wanted to make a new game, something small and easy to manage. I jumped into the editor for Cover Your Eyes and see what I could salvage. There was over 2000 odd graphic files, 600 maps, and a awesome soundtrack that would’ve never reached the light of day. The game of lost hopes and dreams that started off in my early 20’s but nowhere near completion coming up to the big 30.

Continuing to poke around, I looked underneath the bonnet and somehow, someway managed to fix the frame hiccup that made me quit all those years ago.

One week later I found a workaround to give the player a melee option. Two weeks later I scrapped 60% of the game and resumed development :D


What’s been scrapped?

- The original story has been scrapped and reworked.
- The game world is no longer semi open and a lot more liner as the result of the story change. Created so many problems with balancing and seemed less focused as a result, survival horror is all about pacing.
- One of my key features, destructible doors has been axed. A whole year of eventing down the drain due to engine limitations. It was cool having monsters chase after the player, knocking down doors to reach their target. But I couldn’t have the game run at 5fps the whole entire time :/
- Hold shift to aim, no longer has a depleting bar. It was initially a workaround due to not being able to reload weapons. Once the bar reached zero, you had a short period where the weapon couldn’t be used. Honestly don’t know what I was thinking at the time.


New stuff

- You can interact with the world in fun ways. Break a window, throw a mattress on the sidewalk, jump out of window, land on mattress.
- Pick up ladders, boxes and planks to reach inaccessible areas
- Shoot locks off doors.
- Climb down ventilation shafts.
- You can score critical hits when you hover the cursor over an enemy. Originally it was the only way to hit enemies doing the previous method but it came at the expense of having no working melee weapons. Speaking of which…
- Melee weapons :D

It’s been an incredibly productive year and I cannot wait until the game is out in the wild. There’s still a heck ton of work to do but I can see the finishing line closer than ever before. Love you RMN <3

“Kept you waiting, huh?”



Yep this is still alive! Good news is I'll soon be dropping a proper trailer, release date and a massive info dump on what the heck happened for the last several years. I'm still preparing stuff behind the scenes, so expect this all to occur on the 1st of December along with a update to the gamepage. In the meantime I'll be doing weekly game design tweets over at @StarOSkipp.

Thank you for reading <3