(This is a reupload of a post I made on Itch a week ago. I basically never post over here on IndieDB but I thought that since I already started I should keep updating the page for the people who do only use this site. I would highly recommend following Skygrave on Itch or Gamejolt instead because you'll see way more stuff a lot more frequently over there.)
So, I've been gone for a while. As some may have noticed.
Actually I just looked at my last post and it looks like I thought I would be back in just a week. Yeah, that didn't really work out did it...
But fret not! I may have been pretty much gone from the internet for the past few months, but that doesn't mean that development has been dead all this time. As before my last post, I have been making progress, but merely stuff that I either consider not too interesting to share over here, stuff that isn't finished and refined enough, and things that simply I cannot reveal for other reasons.
Dark reasons. Terrible reasons. Disturbing reasons. Such as spoilers for example.
Now especially I couldn't dedicate any time to keeping this devlog alive, as the last few months have been extremely hectic for me, more so than any time ever during development. Things have finally returned to normal, and I'll try to be more active over here now.
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It's dawning on me now that it's been a whole year since I first uploaded this page on itch and started making these posts. I think now that it's been so long I should talk a bit about what my original plans for this project were, and how they have changed over the year.
My original plan was to have a demo out by June or July. Back then I knew that I shouldn't announce any official release date however, and now I'm really glad that I didn't because that would've been, as I assumed, a total disaster. It would stress me out, dissapoint anyone expecting the game to release on that date, and obviously if I forced myself to finish something by then it would be a completely inferior product to what eventually will be made.
In the years prior to the start of this devlog Skygrave was a continually shifting vision in my mind, and what made me start this devlog was when I had finally come to something more concrete and worth talking about. This main vision is still alive now, but as with any project things still of course evolved over time and will continue to evolve, though to a lesser degree, until the end. Over this year things have been changed, shifted around, discarded, and even completely new things and ideas I never thought of before have come to be. This is all in my efforts to truly refine this experience into something that satisfies me.
The art style is a fairly big example of something that's changed. You can see from some of the earlier posts that a lot of the character and enemy design was going more for a pixel art aesthetic. I want Skygrave to have a gothic and medieval feel to it, and eventually I realised the pixel art just didn't fit with this and wasn't satisfying the grandiosity I want from this world. It just made things feel kind of hollow, especially as compared to what I see in my mind. So the direction has gone into a traditional artstyle inspired by religious and dark ominous woodcut art from the reinassance and the early modern period.
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Skygrave is obviously very important to me. To me, it's not just any other game I'm working on. I think it'll make more sense once it's out, but it is a story that is very important to my heart. And this is why I want it to be great, I want it to be something that sticks in the mind and does not want to leave. In my worthless and impossible pursuit for perfection, it will take some time for me to release something I'm proud of. I have no idea when that is, though the end certainly is somewhere in sight as things slowly begin to line up. But just like the last time how I didn't have a definite release date, I won't do so again until I'm absolutely certain that I can make that deadline.
What I can say is that I plan to make more posts now that I'm finally able to do so, and definitely there's stuff from the past months that I want to finally start sharing here.
First on my mind at the moment is that I'm not very satisfied with the page for the game on Gamejolt or Itch, as I feel like I've come up with a better idea for its presentation. I also plan on finally making a proper trailer for the game, which will also be a part of the game page. These will probably be the next updates you will see here.
Also, if you're really starved for content I did just post another song I recently made for the soundtrack over on my channel. You should definitely subscribe there because it's another place where I post stuff from the game from time to time that's not always in these devlogs.
