We're not dead...
First and foremost, I want to assure everyone that we are alive, well, and working on getting Infinite Mansion into a state where we are comfortable releasing it. Even in an Early Access state, we want to make sure that if people are willing to put any amount of money or faith in a product, they are getting something of value. To that end, we have been hard at work on several tasks...
Shader Overhaul
Some may have seen already, but last month we did a complete overhaul of the shaders being used for Infinite Mansion in an attempt to bring the visual style of the 3D objects more in line with the 2D characters, as well as better establish the theme and tone of the game. Now with our custom built crosshatching and outline shaders, we think the game has a much more unique identity, however we'd LOVE to hear your thoughts! You should be able to see the changes for yourself in our updated demo!
More Mysteries
Our goal is to deliver AT MINIMUM 10 unique mystery seeds that can be played when the Early Access game launches. Playtesting indicates that each mystery should take an average of 30 minutes to an Hour to complete in a single run, putting us at an average of 7.5 hours of gameplay at launch if you were to solve every mystery on your first try. We want to bump that up even more if possible, and will keep you updated!
More Monsters
We have added 3 new cultist monsters to the build and want to at at least 2 more before launch. Hopefully this will give us a good variety of monsters to sprinkle throughout The Mansion and keep things fresh. Creating new monsters is definitely one of the more time consuming elements, so we'd love to hear from everyone as to their hopes for different monster types and combat scenarios as we work towards our EA release.
Replacing AI art
Last (but definitely not least), we have decided to do whatever we can to replace the temp AI generated splash art for the Early Access release. This decision in particular has the potential to set us back several months, as we have only a single 2D artist creating all of the assets for the game (and that artist is also the lead dev), but it all boils down to the fact that if we are going to accept money for our game, we want to do everything possible to make sure there isn't any AI generated artwork in there, even if we intend to replace it later anyways.
This means that the Early Access build of the game may likely have placeholder art at different stages of completion when we release, but we feel that even sketches with the personality and style behind Infinite Mansion are preferable to the bland gloss of AI generated temp art.
There has been some discussion about packaging the AI art as free DLC that users can optionally enable if they would like a more immersive experience instead of the temp art and sketches, but I'm curious to know people's thoughts on this.
Signing off
That's all we have for now. I would love to say that I am going to commit to more frequent updates (I'm sure it would be better for marketing and visibility, haha) however I know that often times we need to make a choice between developing the game, or telling people ABOUT developing the game, and I'll always opt for the prior.
For that reason, even if we don't commit to an update schedule, I promise we will return when new milestones and features are implemented. This way we can start to establish a roadmap for release and (hopefully) a more concrete release date!
Till next time,
-Jeff