*Blows the dust off thread*
Uh, hello everybody. As the deadline for the competition rapidly approaches, I thought I would take a moment to do a bit of an update how I am progressing with Witch City. After the release of the first demo, I took a bit of a break to wait for 4.1 to come out so when it did come out I wouldn't be overwhelmed with features to port over. I both regret that decision and am happy I made it. Since the release of 4.1, as some of you know, I have been diligently working on trying to fix 2-way horizontal scrolling which has lead to my own Scrolling-Focused Core that I just finished a few days ago. The plan/hope was to finish the core before the competition to let other people use it, but it didn't quite work out that way. Part of me wishes that I shelved the core to get back to working on the game, but at the same time I feel like it would have been much harder to get back to working on the core after taking a break from it. Plus for about the past month+ I was constantly feeling like the core was almost finished only to discover I still had much more to do. At least I feel like my NES coding knowledge increase by 1000% and I am feeling much more confident about being able to really make Witch City something special.
As for the release for the competition, this brings us back to being both happy and regretful about not working on the game between the release of the demo and 4.1. I wish that I had more new features ready to go for the competition, but I am also very glad that I don't have to port more stuff over at the last minute like this. At this point, I might feel lucky to basically have the previous demo ported over to 4.1 (plus scrolling) in time for the deadline. That said there will be some new stuff coming aside from scrolling. For one thing a friend of mine has been spearheading organizing and writing manual content and I think that's going really well. After finishing the core, I took a couple of days to create some art content for the manual, and here is one image that I particularly like how it turned out.
I probably won't make any more posts between now and the deadline, so see you all on the other side. I'm really looking forward to see/playing everyone's submissions!
And who knows, I might be able to really pull a miracle and add some of the crazy ideas I have planned for Witch City in time for the competition. I've done some of my best work at the last minute under pressure. I've also done some of my worst work at the last minute, but I don't think that's really relevant here.