Alex's Journey to the Grave: August dev updates and a demo release timeline!

Hey everyone, Duhop from Violet Horizons here with a development update for our progress on Alex's Journey to the Grave this August!

I thought for a while before writing this about what I want these monthly updates to be, and for the time being I’ve settled on them being a sort of detailed journal about all the different things going on in the development of Alex’s Journey to the Grave. Not only to keep readers updated on the timeline and progress, but for them to get a more inside and technical look at what creating the game has actually taken.

An alternative to that, and what I’ve often thought would probably be more interesting to people, would be more personal and emotional breakdowns of the story, writing, and characters in the game, since those are probably its largest draws to the target audience. I definitely want to write posts like that at some point and probably will, but without having many eyes or much feedback on the story yet it’s hard for me to dive into it. I feel like I need people to ask questions that I can answer first before I can really make it work.

Anyway, moving on to the updates, this month of working on Alex’s Journey to the Grave has been busier than ever, and there are a number of different things I have updates on!

Key Art

First off, our character artist Paintedtrash has been hard at work carefully planning and creating a CG from a later act of the game that we’re going to use as key art for our store and social media pages prior to the demo release. It’s a spoiler-free scene featuring all three of our main characters, themed perfectly to display the dynamics between them.

It’s not ready to share quite yet, but I’m really excited to get to show it off some time this September! I think it will be an absolute game-changer for generating interest in the game, and I can’t wait to see the difference it will make for the store pages.

A Better UI

One main focus for myself this month has been finding an experienced UI designer and remaking the game’s user interface together with them. This is something that we could have technically released the demo without, but I believe the extra polish it adds will have a massive effect on a player’s first impressions of the game.

Thankfully I have found an amazing UI designer this month with a lot of experience working on visual novels before, and work is now well underway on a fantastic new UI for every part of the game. I’m particularly excited about having a unique new UI for the chatlogs that are very prevalent in the demo, which should add a completely new layer of immersion to those scenes!

Extra Background Artists

I absolutely love our existing background artists and their work, but they only work on the game in their free time, and unfortunately life outside of that has gotten very busy for them recently. As a result, background art has become the slowest part of our production process by far.

To get us back up to speed, I went looking for additional background artists who could hopefully match our existing style… and I found a few that look extremely promising! I’ve commissioned one background from them first to make sure they’re a good fit, but if all goes well you should be seeing some new members of the team and their work within the next month!

Demo Release Timeline

The new demo release timeline I’ve created for September and October looks like this:

September 20, 2024: The new hard deadline for every last asset we need for the demo release. Including all the new UI assets, the key character art, the final few backgrounds, the remaining ambience/SFX, and any programming I can finish up without the assets missing before that date. The Steam page will also be updated with new assets before this date if possible.

September 20-30, 2024: Any final programming needed for last minute assets, any final updates needed to the Steam page, and most importantly completion of a trailer for the demo utilizing all the now-finalized assets.

October 1-13, 2024: Two weeks dedicated for us to do as much playtesting as possible and make a final round of tweaks and polishing on the demo. Also acts as extra time for us to finish the trailer if needed and ramp up marketing a ton afterwards!

October 14-24, 2024: Two weeks dedicated for select early access to the demo, especially for press and content creators. Something we’re trying for the first time that will hopefully drum up some hype! I’m not entirely sure whether it’s actually worthwhile to delay the demo release for it to be exclusive in this case, so these two weeks will also act as buffer room for other things so we don’t have to delay the public release date if anything else gets delayed.

October 25, 2024: The public release date for the demo!

I will be the first to admit, for Alex’s Hope & Alex’s Solitude especially, that I have had a pretty bad track record of predicting accurate timelines for a release in the past.

But those experiences have taught me how to get better at it! My predictions are now based on an actual projection of all the work needed, which itself is based on how long each part of the production process has taken in the past.

In the last devlog one month ago, I predicted that the demo would release “at least 1-2 months from now”. I guess you could say I was technically correct since I did say “at least”, but my updated timeline this month would put the actual number at 3-4 months from that date.

I believe the difference in this case mostly comes down to me adding more buffer time, as well as time for specific playtesting and marketing purposes that I didn’t really account for last month. There are some other factors that I believe also contributed to how the projection turned out wrong, but I’ve also done something to fix each one:

• Our background artists got much busier than before and had to work on the game a lot less. Like I talked about earlier, I’ve found some more artists to help get the backgrounds done on time!
• Work on everything slowed down after the convention deadline went away and wasn’t replaced with any new deadline. I’ve created a new hard deadline of September 20th for all work on assets for the demo to be done. This deadline is much more reasonable than the convention deadline, so it hopefully will act more as a soft goalpost for me and the team to keep in mind and have most of our work done well ahead of rather than a hard wall for us to smash our faces into when we rush ourselves and still fail to meet it.

Overall, I am very confident right now that this most recent timeline will turn out to be accurate. I’ve put a lot more thought into it and I believe it’s much more reasonable than predictions I’ve made in the past. We shall see whether I’m correct or not by the time the next devlog rolls around!

Thanks so much for reading through if you made it this far! I hope someone can enjoy these more detailed insights into what we’re up to, whether it’s someone interested in the present or someone (perhaps myself?) looking back from the future!

-Duhop