hello! this month went by very fast .. a lot of my work was primarily on background stuff (like writing/rewriting narrative, organizing a giant sheet of info for people doing music for the project, and generally planning things to work on later) which i cant really touch on most of yet, however i do still have something cool ill share with everyone as im quite excited about it!!

in fact ill get right to talking about that..

The Target System

this is a mesh of a ton of ideas ive had while working on the project, and is easily one of the things im proudest of in terms of writing!! the target system is going to somewhat replace the games original battle royale adjacent plot focus and shift into something more social deduction centered (something ive wanted to do since forever but never really could figure out how to do in a way that felt like it maintained the same stakes/core ideas) .. in general the battle royale structure was iffy as i still wanted recruiting and befriending the cast to be a core part of the game, which is kind of antithetical to participating in a battle royale isnt it .. i justified it by saying that of course people would temporarily ally in this situation, or even believe they can make it out together somehow, but ultimately that wasnt strong enough justification and it felt flimsy at best .... the new system however makes things a million times more interesting while also allowing me to focus on character writing which is what i always wanted to do with this game since the beginning (something that was obviously also hard to do in a battle royale setting..)

let me break the system down so things make a little more sense:

each character at the end of the prologue is given 1 character they HAVE to kill to survive, referred to as their target. no two people share the same target and everyone is someone elses target, meaning whoever you play as must somehow evade the character hunting you as well as ensure your target does not survive .. also, nobody is forced to share who their target is, meaning whoever you decide to trust may have you as their target, and vice versa.. depending on who you play as, you will have to deal with that characters target as well as whoever has them as their target, meaning playing as different characters now has even more new content to experience as you have to play out different hunter/hunted combinations each time!! you may be thinking, wont it get old watching characters make the same revelations over and over after playing through the game as a few different characters ? which is a thought i had also.. and my solution was to create a set of 3 different scenarios!

upon starting a new game, youll be prompted between scenario A B and C, each of which will give every character a new target, meaning things can play out very differently! of course, this sounds daunting from a writing perspective, and it is.. the earlier releases of the game will likely only feature scenario A, but hopefully the prospect of additional scenarios is exciting nonetheless!

hopefully this new system is as exciting to everyone as it is to me, ive wanted the game to have a social deduction element for a very very long time and im really happy i finally managed to come up with something that works as well as this does!! heres an old role based system more adjacent to the game Werewolf/Mafia that i came up with a long time ago for instance:

a lot of reasons this one didnt pan out lol .. but thinking through these sort of things helped me narrow down just what i was looking for so i dont regret spending a lot of time on them!!

onto the less crazy stuff, heres the finished battle sprites for those who hadnt seen them all yet!!

im really really happy with them all!! im excited to see them all in motion but of course thatll be a while as im prioritizing extensive asset work for characters that i plan to make playable first, therefore darek and eli (the first 2 playable characters) are the only ones with proper animation work done for the most part.. (morgans idle animation is done but i decided hed be playable later in development instead of working on him right after darek)

speaking of eli, hes now the second character to get a proper set of earlygame skills to play with!! heres a little bit of info on those:

generally want him to play into a more slow but heavy hitting archetype along with giving damage buffs to allies, as opposed to darek being defense focused.. im happy with how hes turned out so far!

now that the game has some level of strategic decision making ive also had a lot more fun when it comes to testing stuff, heres some footage of what earlygame darek plays like (along with some new animations i havent showed off yet), keep in mind some things are very wip here

so far im really happy with how things are coming together!! as always let me know what you all think..

Wrapping up

overall i wasnt super happy about my output this month, but its a little hard to avoid some burnout working on this more consistently .. next month im going to try to pace myself better and i may or may not take a break outright for the month (ill let everyone know of course) .. we will see! in general i think i need to work out some kind of designated break period to avoid burnout better.. if any of you work on any creative projects regularly and have some advice regarding this definitely let me know!

lastly, i wanted to gauge interest on whether or not youd all be interested in some kind of patron exclusive (for the time being) discord server, where you can just reach me easier and talk with everyone else about anything game related, as well as ask me any questions somewhere others can see my answer so everyone is on the same page and stuff.. id also be able to host playtests and such a lot easier that way when the time comes, and itd make getting feedback easier

but that depends on if youre all interested!! so be sure to let me know!!

thank you all so much for reading as well as your support, i cant express enough how thankful i am for all of you being as supportive and patient as you are and i hope all of you enjoyed reading this months news!!

next month ill likely just continue working on battle stuff, but ill share anything cool that comes of that next time, so please look forward to that!

thank you all again!!!!!