This is it...one whole year of devblogs! This one took a while to write up since it's both an update post but also an end-of-year post.

Speaking very bluntly, 2023 was pretty rough mostly due to unemployment and trying to balance working on C3R at the same time. The project also hasn't secured more funding for the year (and at this point I doubt it will anytime soon, though it will still get done. As it goes). I've also been feeling a bit of burnout from all this compounded stress, so at the same time I'm trying to pace myself as reasonably as possible.

Regardless, I'm still pretty happy of what I was able to achieve throughout the year even if it was a bit bittersweet. I was personally pushing for a 2023 public release which didn't happen, but at this point I would rather push things back a bit more than stress and rush something without any real deadlines. I hope 2024 will be The Year, but, we'll see.

Overall the bulk of the art for C3R was pretty much completed--here's a very brief overview of what art tasks are left, which are pretty much just the cutscenes themselves and a few UI items:

On top of that, the core functions for Sepsis' and Barrett's routes are already implemented. The last major milestone to a stable demo is completing the narrative system and importing all the dialogue text for each route. Then, well, it's a matter of doing a lot of playtesting and fixing any bugs that pop up from that.

Over the last few weeks though, I was able to go back to some UI portraits to add more expressions for Sepsis and Splint:

I also made all the UI icons for the villagers you'll be talking to in Barrett's route--here's what some of them look like:

In the end, this year ended up being more art-heavy which was great. If you've been keeping up with these dev blogs, thank you for the support! Every share/like/comment/engagement/etc really helps, especially with the limited reach a project like this has.

And to close off this post, here's every single (or at least almost every single) piece of artwork finished for C3R this past year!

And just for fun...at this time last year the narrative script was at about 10k words, now it's at 13k+ words--so about a 3k increase in 2023!

Anyway, may 2024 be The Year and I'll be back in January with more updates!

- Santo