Hi there,
It's been a while since my last update on Dark Lessons, my psychological horror game where your teacher is up to no good.
If you've been wondering whether work on Dark Lessons is still going on, first of all: Great, you thought about my game! Thank you!
But also: Yes, I've been working on the game quite steadily, actually — it's just that much of my progress hasn't felt worthy of being shown around yet to me.
As an example, I spent some time in January on the save game mechanism. Essential functionality, but also not much to write home about. In February and March, I added custom animations for my villain Agatha to replace the ready-made downloaded ones that I had originally used for my placeholder character model. I also upgraded the game to run on a newer version of the Godot game engine and did a lot of optimizations to reduce load times, going through all the file sizes and types of files used in my game ... but as I am writing this, I can already sense you drifting away and falling asleep reading it ...
Wake up, please!
Let me tell you about something more interesting, namely the moment I entered Content Hell. This is the phase of development where all the basic systems are in the game but I still need to churn out lots and lots of content before the game is done.
Besides content for puzzles, there's content for lore, such as this newspaper you'll find in Agatha's living room. One of the challenges in the months ahead will be enriching the game's world with many more of such items.
A Match Made in Hell: Arthur and Agatha
The other big task that occupied me in the last couple of weeks was to finally create the 3D model for Agatha's poor late husband, Arthur. He got a bit too involved with the Arcane, and it didn't go well for him.
I already teased Arthur in one of my earlier newsletters when my amazing artist Hitsugitoshi created the concept art. I've now sculped his model, and while some details and the textures — which will need to do some heavy lifting — are still missing, I finally feel comfortable sharing my progress with you.
Whenever I do one of these characters, it feels like I'm biting off a bit more than I can chew. While I can now create a simple piece of furniture or another small item in Blender within perhaps half an hour, getting these characters with their organic shapes right is still a week-long process besides taking care of my day job and family.
Luckily, there'll only be one more character in Dark Lessons. I won't be tackling that one before releasing the demo, so I hope I'll be able to make good progress with everything else in the meantime.
Right now, I'm working on getting Arthur ready to for an updated trailer, which will be included in an event at the end of May.
Until then, if you haven't done so yet, I would really appreciate it if you could wishlist Dark Lessons. It's the easiest and most effective way of helping me out, and it really does make a difference!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2675700/Dark_Lessons/