This week I completed the last cutscenes in the game! That meant a lot of writing, art, and coding.

I’m not some genius writer, so there isn’t much point in a big blog post about it. Mainly, I just try to ensure every line of dialogue has a purpose — usually to drive the action forward or reveal something about a character, that kind of thing. I have little psych profiles and personality summaries on each character that I use to help me decide how they’d respond to events, and what language they’d use. …that’s about it!

With the cutscenes finished, I was able to stitch them together into the game! Now you can play the whole thing from start to finish, including the story (although excluding the credits.) Definitely a very exciting milestone for me. It’s almost like it’s becoming a real game now!

All the new stuff I created this week is late-game and spoilery, so the rest of the post will be a look at how things have progressed over the last three months.

At the beginning of the year, I posted my sticky note chart of everything left to do. Above is what it looked like then, below is what it looks like now! It’s not an absolute indicator of progress, but it’s something!

Some stickies are trivial. One is literally “email Ethan Lee about making the ports of the game”. Another is “SFX”, which is 99% done and will probably be taken off next week (another really exciting milestone!)

Others, not so much. One sticky is “unlockable characters” — most of which don’t yet exist, in any form. The big ones are “bugfixes” and “playtesting”, and who knows how long those will take (or what I might find!)

Regardless, you can’t deny that half the stickies are gone, and I find that really encouraging!! Hopefully I’ll have worked on something I can show next week so I’ll have a bit more to tell. Until then, I leave you with this new gif of the Intermission cutscene, now with zoomed-in screenshots!