Posted September 14, 2025 by creativeoutofbounds
#devlog
So I uploaded my first game project roughly 1 year and 3 months ago for a pride month game jam, and now I guess it's time for me to announce my first big game project: The Clockwork Spire.
I've been developing this game (mostly) by myself since August 2024, with my friend Wytze doing the music! It's been really fun in spite of how tiring it can be sometimes doing all the art, writing, coding, and sound effect design all by myself @w@.
This game has been something that's been boiling in the back of my mind since early 2022, and it feels incredible to finally be able to get it out of my system. If the screenshots aren't an indication, this game is a visual-novel courtroom drama akin to Ace Attorney and Tyrion Cuthbert.
There she is. The main character; Harlow Black.
In this game, you will play as Harlow as she works to solve four cases of murder-mystery, from the angle of proving that an innocent person is, in fact, not guilty of the crime they are accused of having committed. And all of the courtroom drama action will take place in the titular courthouse--The Clockwork Spire of Drainsbury.
As of right now, the only case that has gotten any work done on it, even remotely, is Case 3: Mystery of the Haunted Yew Tree, where you defend a man who works as a paranormal investigator from being convicted for murdering one of his closest friends.
Unlike the game franchise that everyone can obviously tell that I was inspired by, I plan on telling a story that is focused a lot more closely on the society that the game takes place in and the social injustice present in it. The vibes I'm going for is late-Victorian steampunk fantasy, but with a social culture closer to our modern day. Themes of queerness, discrimination, neurodivergence, abuse, poverty, and other such topics are all things that I'm aiming to write about (to the best of my abilities, of course. How well this will actually translate is still yet to be seen.)
And, in addition to that, I plan on making this game be very info-dense. Though that does sound bad, I suppose; what I really mean is that there's a lot of details and moving parts to each mystery. I am really bad at telling simple stories in a simple way, and the compromise to that is basically just embracing the fact that this game is set in a universe that I've been world-building for the better part of 4 years running. Yeah, the universe this game is set in predated the idea for this game's story by at least 2 years. There's so much world-building and lore-dumping that I wanna throw into this game, and I need to make sure that the final product isn't... that. As I'm working on it, I'm probably just gonna let off a lot of steam with that, and then I'll go back and edit it out later in order for it to not feel as forced. It's called AuDHD creativity, your honour.
Of course, Harlow Black isn't the only character. My current count (according to the number of folders in my "Character Sprites" art directory) is 33. Most of these 33 characters do not play a major role; there's a lot of side NPCs and characters who exsist to populate a single scene, but they sure are there! And I sure spent just as long designing them as the actual main characters!
One of them is, of course, Lykra Queen. She's the prosecutor who will be facing up against Harlow in most of her court appearances. Her and Harlow were characters I originally designed as fully human (boring) back in 2022 before I decided to make them into lesbian fantasy furries. Oh yeah did I not mention? This game is secretly a yuri romance in disguise. Well, no, not really "disguise"... Harlow does a bad job at hiding how much of a disaster she is.
Wow is there a way to shrink images in these blog posts? I guess not. Lucky you, getting to see the close up detail of my sprite colouring.
There really needs to be a way to shrink these... Whatever. Have big Morikawa.
When it comes to help from other people, the biggest help by far is my friend Wytze. He has been doing all of the music for this game and that has been a massive relief since that means I don't have to learn how to make music (or how to use a DAW. I hate those. Hire an interface designer please for the love of God.) Other friends that I wanna mention includes Houli Passix who designed one of the characters currently in the game (Axel Charlottesmede) and many others who have yet to appear; and also my friend Líf who has been dubbed "Chief Playtester" and the first person to hyperfixate on this silly little world-building and game project.
I'll post a few more screenshots onto this post. Mostly just of fun stuff that I wanna share somewhere without just rambling about it for a few paragraphs and risk spoiling things.
This game is still going to take a lot longer to come out than I initially predicted. The only thing about the development time that I did predict was that I was going to predict it taking less time than it would end up taking. Once Case 3 is done, I'm probably going to release the whole case as a demo here on Itch, and once I've gone back and done Case 1, I'll replace it with a demo of just that case. And from then I don't really know what I'll do, but I'm sure I'll think of something!
Anyway, thanks for reading this, if you did!
Quill (CreativeOutOfBoundsException)