Hello folks! It's the marketing dude here. I'm all new to the team and since John is currently busy, hunting dead coalminers near Japans southern coast, it's my sacred duty to bring you up to date on our doings with the VC project. So, lets go.
We (that's John, the programmer person, graphics guy, sound man and me, the marketing dude) decided, we want you to get your hands on the game as soon as possible. Because of ... unfortunate timely restrictions ... *coughdayjobscough* we can't deliver the complete game any time soon but what we can do is deliver a demo. And we will deliver it in august. It's going to be a vertical slice of the game. That means it's going to have all the relevant features in it but will be very short and limited to one or two places that you can explore, find out how the game ticks and see if it's something you'd want to play.
In order to bring that demo to your PCs we've been putting in a lot of effort into pushing the game forward. The graphics guy has been working super hard to get the mood right, the way John wanted it, work on all the details. Overall make sure it looks okay. But most importantly: Ellen, Johns ghost companion, finally got a set of animations. She went almost three years without any motion at all and was a mere placeholder sprite in the game. But finally, she's looking gorgeous. No necro, man.
Did you know? You probably didn't. But Ellen can actually walk through walls at will. When playing as her in the game, you can use that to your advantage. Also, only she can talk to other ghosts. Which is a good thing because they will be helping her and John to continue their adventure through the depths of the Vrennman mansion. Of course, as ghosts are, they'll not do it for free. Help them, help you. Ghostly business as usual. The programmer person was working nights on end to improve the development tools and fix a whole lot of little and annoying bugs in the game and in game systems. Additionally to that, he worked on new gameplay components and on optimising that lightmapping process.
Also: There is an inventory now. Previously we had a system where you'd have a list of possible interactions based on items in your inventory. So if you had a key for a door, you'd get the interaction to open it. However, without a visual inventory, it was pretty hard to keep track of things you had already collected or not. So with the new system, when you interact with something that requires one or more items, you can now pick something from your inventory and see what happens. Also the new inventory allowed John to add a bit of description for each item. That can convey something of the lore or maybe even useful information regarding its usage.
John will also not relent from commenting on the interactions he makes with the world. These are mostly grumpy remarks because it's John we're talking about. But they can also contain hints for you. Besides the interactions with quest objects there's also a lot of material than can be found by looking at all sorts of things.
There are paintings in the world that tell a story through short peotry. If you find them all (they are not all in the demo though :)) you can piece together a dark story about being born and getting lost in the dark muddy waters of anger, hatred all encompassing loneliness. What that means? It means something. I'm sure.
And that, good folks, is the road so far down to august. Where a demo will await in the night of the blood moon.
No, really. I think there's no blood moon in august. But there will be a demo regardless and you'll know when that happens. We'll tell you.
Cheers!
