The Creature of Castorfield August Update!

Welcome back to another monthly update for the Creature of Castorfield!

This month's update saw a few big leaps and bound forward, but as its design is very different from our other games, let me break it down a little bit.

There is currently eight locations, intended to have art like above. (there's room for one or two more if things go well) And our artist doing these backgrounds only have one left to complete. We'll be slowly revealing them monthly, because it's something to see, but also doesn't spoil any of the other work being completed.

All of the actual writing of the game is gated by getting documents designed, for example the police report template shown in the earlier updates.

And the exciting reason for why we're showing off the doctors office in this update is that, it's been implemented into the game. (Previously we only had the office, and some of the MCs cabin) and part of that implementation is 27 readable documents added to the game, which is perhaps 1/3rd of the doctors final document count.

Three of the major locations have document deposits for you to look through to help learn things about the lore of the game, which will be key to unravelling its mystery. Some of the other locations are hubs for you to interact with certain characters. The entire list of townsfolk of Castorfield has been completed, and their stories loosely compiled, so which of the townsfolk that are really important for you to talk to have been highlighted and have areas where you might meet them. Considering this game spans over 50 years, a lot of the people that are important will have died, and only show up in the documents, but their link to the present day is important.

We've got the first designs of the main character down, with a rough guide for how they will transform over the planned forty days that the game takes place over. Aside from the main character, there's four other characters planned to have art of them completed; the creature, and three people that you would meet in the town. This can potentially be expanded.

Because of the hit we've taken lately, we're hesitant to say yes to some of these "We could add more here" moments, and so we're focusing a lot more on the core, must-have art, to get the game to a playable state, and then seeing what needs adding to embellish the story, or to raise excitement for the player.

Next month we're planning on having an interactive map complete, for how you will navigate around the town, and some more documents for follow up in the doctors office, and time permitting, getting started on the library which will have a lot of non-standard written material, like blueprints, survey maps, and the like.

I'm still very excited to be working on this project, and as it's slowly coming together I know that it'll be a very different experience to the standard THM fanfare, but approaching from a very different direction, and its non-linear design will be really interesting allowing for players to explore in any order, and find lots of interesting hidden parts of the story as the mystery unfolds!