I'm just posting to show that I'm still here and still working on the game. Without getting into specifics, it's been a rough year so far, but I'm making good progress.

I've had to formalize a system to speed up cutscene creation. Until recently, I had been creating cutscenes using a Rube Goldberg approach that involved a lot of one-time-use code. This proved to be fairly slow, making everything quite a chore. The new system has a formalized structure to its instructions, run by a special controller object, and some of the blocking of the scene is now visual. Honestly, the new system might even let me do some fun things like having NPCs perform simple routines in the background.

EDIT: Added the following example of cutscene system 10/26/25

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This is what it looks like.  The film strip Icon is the controller object, and the goofy-looking dummies are generic actors, and the "X " marks are points for the actors to reference when walking around the scene.

The Generic actor NPCs have a few variables that I can set in the editor, mostly just if they are visible and their walking and idle sprite. 

The controller object works with an event incrementer and a switch statement that uses custom functions to set the state of an actor.
Actors have built-in variables for  the following: 

• when they are acting out an action,
• set If the controller should wait for the last action to complete
• a target to walk to 
• a animation to play
• a dialog box to display
• If to hide or destroy itself

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Not sure why I was so afraid to show some of this when I made the original post, I think it's because I don't consider myself a real programmer. LOL. end edit.

There's a funny joke where I thought the game wouldn't have too many characters, but it turned out that there's a bunch of 'em. I don't know if you've checked, but a bunch of 'em, it turns out, is a lot more than not too much.  like 43 of 'em. They all needed talking head art for the text box UI. They all have at least 6 frames of animation LOL. That's well over 250 frames of animation because some characters have different expressions or outfits. What I mean to say is, I'm almost done with that part of the job, so I've got that going for me.

The stories for both the 2nd and 3rd nightmares have been improved. (Oh, hey, I added characters in there somewhere )

The overworld is mostly done. 

A whole new location and game mechanic have been added.  ( I'm very happy with it, but I won't be posting any content related to it because I want people to be surprised.) (characters got added here too, )

The game has probably gotten weirder.

I'll try to post something once a month so people know the project isn't dead. Don't expect devlogs to increase beyond that. I'm still a solo dev, so any time spent posting social media and devlogs takes time away from making the game and living my life.