Whew! It’s been quite a while! While I haven’t posted much, I’ve still been at work on The Source! And now, I can say that Act 1 of The Source is finished, and we are at the 50% mark!

When I made the last devlog, I had only completed the prologue and first chapter of the game. This first chapter was very short and simple, as my goal was to make it as quickly as possible. It works, but it’s actually ended up becoming outdated. This first chapter was a great reboot for myself, getting me back into working on the game, and after finishing it I had enough drive to make chapters larger and more in-depth. Which is great! The first chapter probably takes around 30 minutes to play through for the first time, while the next three take around 1-2 hours. I’m very happy with the new chapters, and we’ll get into those in a bit, but the problem is that now this first chapter is outdated in terms of depth and quality. It doesn’t match.

I didn’t want to redo the whole chapter, so I ended up slotting in a couple of puzzle in between existing parts, which I think works pretty well and makes the chapter match the others better.

For a sense of scale, the first chapter of the game has around 6 main areas, and around 10 characters. The other three on average has around 10 main areas per chapter, and around 13 characters per chapter. And these areas and characters are much more dense. For the first act, based on the playtesting I’ve done, I anticipate a playtime of around 4-6 hours of gameplay, which I don’t think is too bad!

I’ve also begun doing music for the game! I’ve never tried making my own music, and up until now The Source has used royalty free tracks for it’s music. But I wanted to give it a go, and it went. . . kind of well. I was decently happy with it, but it wasn’t great necessarily. After a friend of mine practically begged me to let him work on the music for The Source, I let him do a remaster of my theme track for the game, and it was definitely better, so now I have him working with me on the music for the game! One of the things I like about the way I’m doing music is that it adjusts dynamically as you move through the world, with different variations of the music playing as you go to different areas of the game.

Sadly, as much as I would love for it to happen, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do full voice acting for the game. I simply don’t have the resources for that unfortunately. So I added the next best thing- little sounds that play as the text scrolls onto the screen! Nothing super fancy there, but I thought it was worth giving a mention.

While it’s mostly been smooth sailing, it definitely has not been easy the whole time. Multiple systems have been overhauled throughout the last few months and UI has changed. The entire backend for my controller support has been updated to work more betterer and consistently (and it still needs tweaks). The fast travel feature on the map has had SEVERAL UI updates because it continues to be impossible for people to notice. The settings logic in my game had a major backend update to improve performance (I ended up reducing the games CPU usage by around 75%). I’ve dug myself into multiple holes making complicated navigation, with areas that loop back on each other and connect in weird ways that make writing and logic for those areas an absolute nightmare. But, it’s all been a tonne of fun, and I am really proud of where this game is going.

Speaking of changes, I have a major change to mention- I have completely replaced Mahlwem (one of the four main sovereigns of the game). In case you’re not aware of this character, he was this shadow dude who is the god of the moon. Mahlwem traces back to one of my earliest characters. My first release on Steam was a game called ‘The Sink Gods’, which was a Rusty Lake inspired point and click about the gods of the kitchen sink. The ‘high god’ of the game was Sinkus. When I was making the original game jam version of The Source, I included Sinkus as one of the four sovereigns, because it was funny. For the full game of The Source, I wanted to go with a bit more of a serious tone, and so I replaced Sinkus with Mahlwem, god of the moon.

The thing is, when it came time to work on his chapter, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with him. Aside from the fact that his current character design is really bad, I just didn’t have anything interesting to do with him. After some thought, I decided it would be a fun idea to replace him with a Count Dracula style character who lives in a giant manor, and that would be the setting of his chapter. So, let us introduce Count Dragomir, Sovereign over The Black Manor!

I find that his character is a lot more fun and compelling than Mahlwem was, and I’m really happy with how his chapter turned out. Honestly, I’m just really happy with how pretty much everything in this game is turning out.

To be very clear, this game isn’t going to be absolutely amazing. It’s definitely not worth the 3.5 years of development that it’s had. But hopefully it’ll be fun and interesting once it does come out.

Well, that’s all for now. Until next time!

As a quick aside, I’m not making any promises as to when, but at some point I want to update the demo and Steam page to reflect some of the changes I’ve made. I don’t know when that’ll happen, but maybe soon.