Well, it’s been a bit since I un-cancelled The Source, so here’s some updates on how progress has been going!

Firstly, I want to explain how I plan to structure the game and it’s content. The game will have 2 main acts and a finale. The first act will comprise of the prologue (which is contained in the demo), and 3ish chapters. I say ish, because as far as development is concerned there’s really 4 chapters. When you play the game, you’ll pick one of the sovereigns to support, and so you will not have to venture into their kingdom. So from a player perspective there are just the 3 main chapters, but I need to make 4 chapters to accommodate for player choice.

The second act will contain 4 chapters both that I make and the player experiences. These should hopefully be much easier to work on than the first act, as they will have significantly less writing that I’ll have to do.

And then of course there is the finale, which basically will be 1 chapters worth of content. So in total, I essentially have 10 chapters for the game. And currently 2 of these chapters are finished! That’s right, after over 2 years of work, I’ve gotten. . . 20% of the game done. . . Excuse me while I have an existential crisis in the corner for a bit.

It is actually better than it sounds, because 10% of this progress has been work I’ve done in the last couple of months! I don’t fully expect to keep up that rate of progress 100% of the time, but I’m hoping that I can knock out more of this by the end of 2026.

So. . . what has the games work looked like on the development side? Well, I’ve found a pipeline for development that has worked fairly well for this chapter at least. Here’s what it looks like:

1. Create a ‘puzzle dependency chart’ to get a decent outline for what I want the chapter to look like.

2. With that in mind, I then work to cut fluff and refine the chapter.

3. Then I do the majority of the writing using the PDC as a guide for what needs to be written.

4. Now I need to add this to the game!

5. We start by getting basic world travel implemented, adding any new needed dialogues as I go.

6. Then we work on getting character dialogues working.

7. The first step here is to draw the character and get their opening and closing animations working.

8. I’m not super great at drawing people, so I use a 3D basemesh (courtesy of Vertex Arcade on YouTube!) in Blender to get a rough idea of the proportions and pose I’m looking for.

9. Then I bring that into Procreate and trace over it and new drawings a few times until I get a design I like.

10. Then I’ll do the final lineart, colouring, shading, and animations

11. At this point I can pull the character into Unity and add their dialogues to the game.

12. From there I’ll write any new dialogues I find that I need (this is usually the case when I need to add variations of existing dialogues to account for player choice)

13. Then we rinse and repeat until I have all of the character dialogues and interactions working!

15. I’ll then adjust anything I need to, and then get to work adding tags to the dialogue for additional text colouring and stuff!

16. Once the finalised dialogue is in the game, I’ll refine anything I need to, fix remaining bugs, and add sound to the chapter!

And that’s basically the process! It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s progress, and I’m at least happy about that.

Until next time! 😀