February Progress Report

The month is nearly over so it's time for your regularly irregular progress update.

First off, I haven't had a SINGLE bug report for the latest demo, so there's no plans to do any patches or small updates at the moment  I already know what areas I plan on further refining for the next update though.  Icons and important logs.

Icons needed me to finalize what the statuses and skills/armor would be first, so I could then make exactly what I needed.  And with all of that stuff sorted out now, they are the top of my to do list.  It'll be a pretty big task to update everything but it'll make the gameplay experience way better for everyone. To partner with that I'll be adding more books to the game.  In specific the Hunter's Guide set of books which will explain what certain icons mean, and give various tips for how to defeat enemies.

In terms of story content I've been working on Chapter 2: The Witch and the Wolf that Howls my Name.  It's currently about 90% complete which is pretty great.  There's still a few more assets and tweaks to be made but it's fully playable in it's current stage.  Once that's done I'll be moving on to Chapter 1: Prologue - The Girl in the Red Hood.  I don't EXPECT both chapters to be finished in time for the next planned update (probably April.) But ya never know.  It's a bit far away to be making any predictions.  For now I'll leave you with some images from the new content to give you some stuff to think about.

The first tweak is a boring one.  But the introductory text has been updated to reflect the new content.  Important to note that from now on if you decide to skip the prologue chapters, various attributes for Red will be set to default values.  If you instead PLAY the start of the game you'll eventually be allowed to make several choices that will give you some control over how your Red starts the game.  But more on that later!

The proper introduction and title card for chapter 2 are not finished yet, but eventually you'll find yourself in a new map.  The Park.  This is the first time you'll get to be outside of Wonderland in the demo though this section isn't any visually different really.  No glowing flowers or mushrooms all over.  Street lamps. It's small things.

As you make your way down the path you'll meet some NPC's and have some interactions.  There's strange blood stains on the floor?  What happened here?  And why are you here?

And it all culminates in the Wolf's true first scene.  The first meeting that sets the entire game in motion. It was a real challenge doing all of the new art for this section but I'm incredibly proud of the end results and I hope you'll like them as well!

Of course as you know from Chapter 3 this encounter does not go well.  I'll warn you now that this section goes pretty hard on what actually occurs here so you might have a bad time with it.  The acting is especially superb and really sells the fear and pain better than my art or words ever could.

After that you'll have your real first meeting with Witch and be taken away to Wonderland.

But only after a small pit stop!  This is another new section where you'll fly around as a butterfly as the Witch asks you a variety of questions.  This section is not completed yet but the general idea is that your answers will establish what your Red is like at the start of the game.  For example the screen cap above lets you choose between Bloody, Angelic and Seductive.  It should be quite obvious that these represent the three Goddess's that were formally set up in the last update.  So your answer here will decide how much affinity you start the game with.  There's a number of questions and they each will have impacts on what you start the game with.

 And from there you'll reach what should be a familiar scene.  Red wakes up in the Witch's house.  And your nightmare begins proper.  This content hasn't been present since VERY EARLY builds of the game.  So having it added back in now, with all the polish, new art, new music, voice acting.  It really gave me quite the smile.

Again this content is NOT finished yet. It's just barely functional.  But it's in a good place to be done with soon.  I'm hoping to also update the games opening movie/credits sequence to feature the full roster of voice actors (even if they won't yet appear.  Though fingers crossed Scarecrow and Cheshire will have voicing added in by April!).  But yeah so there's still quite a bit to do.  I'll be spending March also working on Chapter 1 as mentioned above.  Either way where last update was very mechanically focused, the next one is really going to be very narrative focused.  So I wouldn't expect much in terms of new combat or events.  Just a lot of context and flavor.

As always thanks so much for all of your continued support.  I hope you look forward to what lies ahead!