The Creature of Castorfield September update

This is our fourth update since starting the Creature of Castorfield project. A lot has been completed, and we've committed to slowly teasing it out for now.

Pictured is the background for Everett Manor. The Everetts are the rich family that own the town and the mines, they are the ones that sent for another sheriff after the last one that disappeared, and they're hoping that you can get to the bottom of the mystery unlike the last one.

A map system has been completed, so that you can travel to the key areas of interest. There is currently 8, and more might be added. All of the backgrounds have been completed also. (We'll slowly show them off here monthly), but this means that soon each location can be strongly defined as to what information it's supposed to hold, and how the player navigates it. Currently the most obvious one is the sheriff's office which has police record documents, but the doctor's office (medical records) is also set up, with the library (maps and historical town records) to be soon after. Now that we're pretty confident about all of the different 'where's' will be, next we can start focusing on the characters.

As far as art is concerned we have a few pieces of the main character (the sheriff), we have two of the town's younger girls (There's a third to be completed soon.) and the creature itself has its first piece of art completed. I don't think i'll ever share what the creature looks like, to keep the surprise alive.

This next part is what is most important.

We're learning from our success with Black Contract. We get asked constantly when the next chapter of Black Contract will release (It's not up to us). This game is going to be designed in a similar style. There will be no dialogue processed by RenPy, it will all be in speech bubbles, and the whole game will be navigated by image buttons. All dialogue sequences or cutscenes, will work just like Black Contract, with animations and transitions in between. We're really trying to cook up something fancy, to the best of our skills. It's been a few years since we started, and it's time to put everything we've learned together to make a game that's going to stand out from the others in our catalogue.

The introduction sequence has already been started, a lot of the comic style panels of the introduction have their own backgrounds, which are already complete, we're up to getting the characters put in.

We're also looking at full voice acting for this project, as we've got a well defined end point for the story, it'll be easier to approach a voice actor with an exact word count, and get it done in one session instead of slowly adding to it over time like Shackles. We've even found a voice actor who can do both male and female VA to match the main characters transformation journey.

We are very excited about the potential for this project, and even though we've taken a big hit from the payment processor problems, we're doing our best to keep it alive. We super appreciate everyone sticking around, and we're excited to deliver this game to you and see you uncover the mystery of the Creature of Castorfield!