Hey everyone, Jim here. Hope you’re all doing well!
If you're new here, we're Jim and Layla - a husband and wife development team working on our first game "The Third Tourist". We're really proud of how the game is coming along - but there is still a huge amount of work left to get us to that initial Early-Access release. If you didn't know, we're fully independent and self-funded (living off savings whilst we make the game). If this game looks interesting to you, your support in these early days could make every difference - https://www.patreon.com/NovemberNorthGames
As usual, we’re overdue a proper update. We’ve been working flat-out, but with only two of us on the project, we’re a bit too stretched to put together a video right now. I’m also fairly hopeless in front of a camera, so for now, a written devlog will have to do.
The last month or two have been a bit of a mixed bag. At the start of May, I got completely wiped out by some kind of virus. No idea if it was a Covid variant or something else, but it knocked me out for weeks. I spent about three weeks stuck in bed, then another three coughing my brains out before I felt anything close to normal again.
Not being able to work was incredibly frustrating. When you’re a tiny team, every lost week feels huge, and it’s hard not to feel like the project and the schedule are slipping away underneath you.
Thankfully, Layla has been fine health-wise, so she’s been able to keep momentum going. A lot of her work has been focused on the mission system, which is a massive part of the game. That includes the engine tools we use to build missions, the runtime and save data that keep everything working, and the way missions are presented to the player through the in-game journal.
In other words: a lot of code, a lot of UI, and a lot of very important invisible work.
She’s also been building out the tutorial stage. This is where we introduce the player character, establish why they’re there, and teach the basics of exploring, investigating, interacting, and finding things in the world. There’s a lot of NPC dialogue and interaction work involved too, and that side of the game is starting to come together really nicely.
Most of the tutorial takes place in and around the mansion, which you may have seen in some of our previous screenshots.
While Layla has been deep in systems and missions, I’ve mostly been focused on world-building. Over the past few months, I’ve added or improved a lot of areas across the map. Much of that has been landscaping: shaping the terrain around buildings, roads, paths, and points of interest so the world feels more natural and connected.
I’ve also added a fair few new locations, including the lighthouse, the sea cave beneath it, a campsite, a retirement home, a service station, and a new section of the island village shopping area.
A lot of these places are still in their first pass. They have building shells, interior walls, and basic layouts, but we’ll be returning to them to add furniture, props, clutter, and all the little details that make them feel lived in. Like most things in game development, it’s an iterative process: block it out, test it, improve it, then keep layering in detail.
A big goal for the game is that you won’t just be exploring a world of exterior shell buildings. Every building is intended to have a proper interior: detailed, furnished, purposeful, and fully explorable. Whether someone lives there, works there, or has left something behind, these spaces are meant to feel like real places within the world.
One advantage of being a two-person team is that we both have to be a bit “jack of all trades.” That can be exhausting, but it also means we can move between different parts of the game when needed. If I’ve had enough of making buildings, I can switch over to performance work. If Layla needs a break from UI, she can jump into mission content or dialogue. It keeps things moving, even when progress is spread across lots of different areas.
One other thing worth mentioning: because the game has a strong stealth focus, we’ve also been adding long grass that the player can use to hide and sneak around. That meant building the systems behind it, making sure the stealth logic understands it, and then placing grass patches throughout the world in ways that actually support gameplay.
Finally, we keep iterating on game-performance. We're trying our hardest to keep targeting the Steam Deck as a performance baseline - that should be enough to keep the game playable by a large proportion of the players out there. Currently on the deck, we're seeing around 40 FPS in most parts of the map, but some of the more complex areas (like the home mansion) we're seeing it drop down to around 25 to 30 FPS - it's not terrible, but we know it's not good enough and we need to be hitting at least 30 FPS everywhere.
So that’s where we are at the moment. Progress has been a little slower than we’d like, especially with illness getting in the way, but the game is still moving forward. The mission systems are maturing, the tutorial is coming together, and the world is steadily getting bigger, denser, and more playable.
Thanks, as always, for sticking with us. We know we’re not always the best at posting updates, but we’re still here, still working hard, and still very excited about where the game is heading.
