It's been a while but progress has been made since I last posted.

The office nightmare  is nearly finished! It's playable from beginning to end with puzzles, cut scenes, and mini game all complete. I'm still working on the final boss and some odds and ends though.

I've been doing a lot of art for the next two parts of the game, the main world, and nightmare 2.

 

This nightmare is all about getting freaked out by "occult" things and falling pray to sensationalize panic. I'm going for a very old school horror movie vibe. Be prepared for ghost hunting and zombie bashing in a small suburban town haunted by the undead and eldritch cults summoning forgotten horrors.  Also watch out for that neighborhood watch.

I've also been working on the main over world, and the many stores in the game.  Here's a preview of one of them, the scratching post cafe!

There's three other stores but I'll leave those for another day. 

So with me making all this art you might be asking yourself, what's he drawing all this art in?
The answer is game maker studio.


I draw and animate nearly everything In game maker studio. GMS's image editor is as simple as MS paint but with enough extra features that it's my all purpose no fuss solution of choice. I have aseprite and will sometimes use that for backgrounds that need to tile in all 4 directions but I don't use it that much because of how the pallet system works.  I use GMS for the art at the low resolution I work at because it won't let me go over board with unnecessary details.  I really love adding extra details into nearly everything and I know that if I was working at a higher resolution and fidelity I'd be designing stuff down to the exact make and model of gas pump or ice machine. I still think about all that stuff anyways but at least at this lower game resolution I have to be economic and efficient in the assets I make.

That even means knowing when to remove or replace content.  Speaking of removing content...


I know that none of you knew it was a thing but the radish king will not be appearing in this game.


There was a part of the main over world that involved a long trading sequence that I've decided to cut and replace with a shorter more gratifying puzzle that's nicely  self contained. This  trading sequence involved fighting the radish king and being put on trial in radish town  after running around the whole over world and the factory trading various junk items till you obtain a lantern to light a pitch black maze.

 It's a leftover from a time when I feared the game might be too short but now that I have more than one part of the game finished I'm concerned the game might be too long.  Most parts of the game are running up play times  2X or even 3x as long as I thought they would. This trading sequence was longer and more involved than it needed to be ( as long as a single nightmare segment) and killed the pacing of the game.  So it's out of the game and I feel the game will be better for it.

Demo coming soon. Just have to do a bit more business stuff before it's released.