Hello. :) I've been working on this game for some time so it's already close to being finished! All that's left is to finish up the CG cutscenes and create the soundtrack and sound effects.

Turnaround is a short puzzle, somewhat horror game where you search for different ways to escape a house after being kidnapped. There are 7 different ways depending on your method of escape, though one of these ends are not quite like the others... 

First order of business: finish drawing the cutscenes!

I'm going for a pretty simple style as this game is a side project and I didn't want it to distract me too much. 6 out of 7 endings are completed, with the 7th one being the longest of them all.

I'm looking forward to working on the soundtrack after so much drawing... I'll probably upgrade my DAW before then since my current one is quite old and buggy.

So close to finishing all the cutscenes... only one image left, though I think I'll go back to a few older ones to touch them up a bit to look better.

Like here where I think the hands look a bit small...

After that, it's over to sketching out ideas for the main menu.  I already have 2 crude sketches, but I need to spend more time considering the menu composition.

I've been working on improving some of the CG visuals, as well as continuing to sketch different ideas for the main menu. Here's a few scenes from the intro:

I'm still not completely satisfied with how it looks, but at some point you have to decide that enough is enough and accept the flaws. The game would never release otherwise.

In most images I have just redrawn small parts, but sometimes something is so ugly it's best to just start (mostly) over. Here's a work in progress, but by far the best improvement:

I'll continue to look over my old images and see which ones should be cleaned up and then start designing the main menu.

I'm done with all the CG. Only thing left to draw now is the main menu!

I've been working on putting together all the cutscenes. I wish RPG Maker had better ways to test your game, but you deal with what you have.

I've also been messing around with the code to make the text boxes look nicer:

I want to remove some of the empty space below + add some space on the left side of the text.

Soon I'll have to do my least favorite part... add sound effects. I'll play around with jsfxr, a free program for creating 8-bit sound effects. I want to match the art style of the main game play.

After some fiddling, I managed to edit the dialogue box to something more pleasing. Looking at it now, I think I'll also go back and remove some of the spacing between the letters.

I'm done putting all cutscenes together except for the last ending. It's the ending with the most images, but I'm about halfway done. I also still need to add the sound effects and music... but adding it is the easy part. Creating it, less so.

I've been doing various small tasks on the game, such as creating and adding sound effects and some quality of life fixes. I also customized the game over screen:

I'll continue working on adding sound effects and making other minor fixes.

Happy news! I have finally ugraded my DAW from Cubase 6 LE to Cubase 12 Artist! Now I need some time to familiarize myself with the new interface, but at the very least it's a lot faster and (hopefully) less buggy than the old DAW.

Other than that, I've finalized the title screen. There's still some more work to add, namely, I want to play around a bit with particle effects, but other than that, I'm pretty happy with how it looks.

I'm trudging through making all the sound effects, which is certainly not my favorite part of the game making progress. At least I can use some sound effects from my other game, Hell's Gate. Silver lining.

Creating the sound effects is a mix of using Cubase, Bfxr, and downloading sound effects and throwing on some bitcrush effects on them for the right "crunchiness". Having too realistic sound effects would clash with the game's simple pixel art style, but the bitcrushing method works pretty well.

In other news, we now have a working inventory:

I had a more complex design in mind for how it should look, but I didn't like how it turned out, so I settled for something more simple.

I still need to add buttons to take the player back to the main menu. Which, in theory, shouldn't be too difficult.

I've decided to add some visual indicators to compliment the audio cues in my games. The cues are there to warn the player of imminent danger and I realized, if the player doesn't have access to audio, it would make the game quite a bit harder to complete.

Now it's also time to start seriously working on the sountrack, which I both look forward to and slightly dread... I do enjoy creating music, but I find it much harder to tell if what I've created is actually good, compared to drawing a picture. It's also harder for me to visualize the finished product, because I can't hear the audio in my head the same way I can see a finished picture... there's a lot more experimenting to find something I like.

It's been a while since I made an update. The reason being, a bit late into the game, I decided I didn't like the design of our second main character. It didn't fit the vibe of what I'm going for, so I've redesigned him and am in the process of redrawing all the old art work to fit the new design. Oops.

Old:

New:

It's interesting to see the obvious quality difference between my old CG's and new ones... part of me wants to go back and redraw the old ones to match the quality of the new, but I know I must restrain myself or the game will never be finished.

Speaking of, I decided to change how I draw open mouths. Before, I just used white without drawing any teeth or tongue, and while that may look fine without color or shading, it looks a bit out of place when that is added. See:

VS

I say it's a definite improvement, and I also get some practice drawing open mouths.

I've decided to create my game page soon, after I'm done drawing all the art work. There's still some more work to be done after (such as playtesting), and I'd like to have some time to pulish the page before the game is published.

Well, it's been a while... I got distracted by playing video games. 😓 But now I'm back on the grind, working out the last small details. I neded up creating a new song for the main menu because I realized the old one didn't fit... oops. But I think I'm reaching the stage where I'll be mostly satisfied.

I've also gone ahead and set up the game page:

Here's hoping I don't get too distracted again...