Happy third anniversary, Absolution ~!

Today marks the third anniversary of the game being conceptualized.

Yes, "conceptualized", not "in development".  You can read what exactly happened on the 24th of October, 2017 in my anniversary post from last year. Long story short, not much happened - it's just a date I picked because it was around that time that I came up with the idea for a horror otome game set in a mental hospital. 

Why then? I remember being largely impacted by the release of Outlast 2 earlier that year - I watched let's plays and remembered my love for the original game from back when Whistleblower was released and I was only starting to get into video games. I never actually played the Outlast games until last year, since most of my favorite games were completely inaccessible to be as a 12 year old with strict parents who had no way of buying games. So I could only marvel at the few that really impacted me on the internet, Outlast being one of them. 

Getting off-topic here, but my favorite part of Outlast was always the characters and I really wished for them to get more attention - so that's what Absolution started out as. If you look closely, you can still see some parallels between Outlast characters and Absolution ones.

What was the game like a year ago?

It's time for my favorite part of the year - recounting the progress I've made since the last anniversary post!

Last time, I started this segment by posting screenshots of the build from a year ago, since it was deep in alpha stages by then and still had a long way to go before I would have been able to publish  the initial teaser build. But since the build from a year ago was already published (or at least the demo was), I don't think it would be all that interesting to post screenshots. So I'll just quickly recount what I had a year ago.

• the game was playable until week 3 on Michael's, Tom's, William's and Sharpe's routes, I sent a build of act 1 of their routes to testers around the time of the previous anniversary,
• Charlie's and Elizabeth's routes were unfinished, either due to writing or assets,
• Jane dreams until the fourth week,
• 12 route-specific nightmares,
• mostly the same  interface and menus,

Now that that's covered, let's move on to the devlog.

The yearly devlog

Let's count.

Writing

• Weeks 4-5 COMMON STORY, or what I like to refer to as Act 2. These contain multiple short events, a character introduction scene, an interactive flashback minigame, 5 investigation events with many branches, 2 weekend events, 2 "Law path" events and 2 "Chaos path" events, along with finally having planned out the ending structure for the common story in detail,
• Important route split event at the start of week 6's common story which determines your ending - with the ending split, your ending is already chosen. All that's left is to write the paths for the end of week 6, the final week, which are the game's finale,
• Week 4 of Tom's route,
• Week 4 of Michael's route along with a nightmare sequence,
• Week 4 of William route, along with two nightmare sequences, the first two scenes of week 5,
• Week 4 of Sharpe's route along with a nightmare sequence,
• Week 3 of Charlie's route, much of week 2 of his route was rewritten to fit the new ideas brought into week 3, 

• 4 route specific nightmares, 1 common route nightmare,
• 1 new Jane dream, all Jane events on week 1 rewritten and switched around to improve the pacing and make sense with what happens later,

• First weekend events that were implemented into a teaser at the end of the demo,
• Multiple week 2-3 scripted events outside of sessions, one long common story one and two on Tom's route,
• 3 optional break interactions with Dr. Young, a side character,

Graphics

• New Michael sprites (from scratch),
• New Charlie sprites (from scratch),
• New Tom sprites (fixed lineart, new coloring, shading, faces),
• New Dr. Sharpe sprites (fixed lineart, new coloring, shading, faces),
• New MC sprites (new faces, shading),
• New Tom's third alter's sprites (lineart, shading, and faces),
• Updated Dr. Young sprites (new faces),
• Completely new sprites for a character you haven't seen yet and updated sprites for another character I won't spoil,

• Silhouette sprites for minor nurse characters who appear during the investigation events,
• 5 backgrounds for the Act 2 events, flashback illustrations for two scenes,

• 5 CGs for Charlie's weeks 2-3,
• All graphics for the 5 route-specific nightmares and 1 common route nightmare,
• Multiple revamped hospital backgrounds, 
• The front of the hospital background,
• MC's house backgrounds, which I'm actually trying to revamp again but might postpone it,

Sound

• Up to 15 new new tracks, some tracks were revamped/rearranged,
• Partial voice acting implemented for four minor nurse characters, two of which were voiced by volunteers,

Coding

• Coded in all the Act 2 events with all the branching and possible outcomes,
• Added four new tutorials,
• Added an alignment meter to MC's character info screen, revealed at the start of Act 2,
• Implemented the achievements screen,
• Added character info screens for three characters and updating the other character's screens with new information from Act 2,
• Implemented 5 route-specific nightmares and 1 common route nightmare,

Community

• Set up donations on itch.io, a Ko-fi page and music commissions to earn money for the game,
• Sent three different builds to testers (Act 1, week 4 with Charlie's route, week 5's common story),
• Collaborated with the developer of Heart Fragment on a crossover, we also tested each other's games and given each other feedback,

• Received 27 nice comments on itch.io  and 24 ratings,
• Got 40 new members on my discord server,
• WatchedVisual Novelty's let's play of my game,

...and probably some more which I forgot. I was mostly thinking of things off the top of my head.

TL,DR: The big things I worked on this year are Charlie's Act 1 and the Act 2 common story.

Oh gosh, that took up half my day to write. Well, I hope it was an interesting read!

This year seemed very uneventful to me, thinking back to it, because I had a lot of work piled up for the first half of it and even took a month of a complete break from development. Summer was very busy as well, so I'm glad I have so much progress to report despite everything.

I estimate that the next anniversary might be the last before release, but please bear with me. The game is scheduled to release somewhere in 2021 for now, and I really feel like I'm past the halfway point now and the game is coming along really nicely. I'm not sure how busy I'll be this next year, spring will probably be tough to manage with all the work that'll pile up then. Well, I hope I won't have to take month-long breaks ever again!

Thank you all so much for reading this, I will see you in another devlog post soon ~