Like normal, I've posted this blog both here and on tumblr. However, I wanted to also shoot out some feelers here for playtesters. Is anyone interested in doing a playtest? This will probably be mid to late June, and I'll try to give at least close to a full month for playtesters. I'm going to be relying on a few personal friends as well, but I'd like to get a few RMN vets if they're interested. Playtesters will get their names in the credits, a Steam key for the finished game and the soundtrack (or I can send these directly), and they'll be playing on an unencrypted version, so they can poke around as much as they want and witness the complex and ultimately boring mysteries of Jimmy's development. I'm also totally willing to do some quid pro quo work on your own projects (playtesting, maybe a little bit of music, etc.) as long as I can do that stuff after development for this game finishes. If you want to playtest and I don't respond, please don't be offended; I only want to bring in people who I'm totally comfortable with, and I have a tendency to be a little standoffish, so that's not a lot of people. If you want to playtest, please let me know either here or via PM.

Anyway, here's the actual progress report that I posted on tumblr:

So, it’s officially summer, and that means I can work on Jimmy A LOT–and I have been! I guess I should get the first big news out of the way: the story is completely in the game now. That means the game is playable from start to finish, and all the scenes are in, all the NPCs have dialogue, and, yes, you can shake them all (with a few exceptions like if they’re, say, bashing a rusted-out car with a baseball bat). The ability to shake everyone was a major pain in the ass to implement, by the way, so I hope you all feel a modicum of gratitude when you’re cheekily prancing around causing chaos to all of the poor inhabitants of Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass.

That said, the game is still not balanced. I’ve put in most of the enemy stats and have started my first pass through the game. My plan right now is to play through the game in its entirety three times–this will ostensibly go faster each time, as I’ll have less glitches, typos, and unbalanced fights to contend with. My first pass is to go through the game the “optimal” way; remember, Jimmy has a lot of optional levels, some of which can be entered way earlier than is wise to. My second pass is going to be me trying to do dungeons out of order and scaling up the fights, and my final pass is going to be me skipping optional stuff altogether to make sure the game is still beatable. I don’t really know how long this is all going to take, but my hope is 2-3 weeks.

After that, I’d like to send the game over to a few different playtesters over the course of a month or so. This will hopefully give them enough time to fully playtest the game, and it’ll give me time to knock out some other stuff I’ve been putting off, like getting the soundtrack into a standalone package, requesting reviews, etc.

Here’s what you can look forward to this month: me figuring out an accurate game length and an actual exact release date (currently looking like mid to late July, but I’ll give an exact date once I finish my testplays).

ALSO: I’m really out of the loop with the game review scene. Where do ya’ll get your gaming news? What websites or Youtube personalities would be interested in RPG Maker games or, more broadly, this kind of retro RPG?