Delays, but here's some design progress!

Hi there, PhoebeJ here! This is one part a sad delay announcement, but also one part design progression on Project Dawn. Between my editor and QA's comments about the game, I agreed it needs a bit more work. The editor really wants to work on my dialog flow, and QA says the optional exploration content, and certain art fixes must be made. I'm not upset, I agree it needs more work, but I was hoping to just get it out there. However, it made not be easy to understand in the form it is in now.

Here's a more visual look at where this was headed. #1. Character Design, my busts are still uneven and I really should take the time to do one or two different poses of each character to improve mood. I am not very good at sprite creation, so I really need to do a stellar job on the dialogue busts.

And last,

Here's the best in game example of how weird this looks...

This is one of the reasons I decided to delay this. I know I can do better than this rush job. Everyone needs to be drawn to scale and in RGB (I think a couple of my images were done in CMYK by accident >_<). Also, some of my character drawings are "lumpy" I guess. I want to take another shot at these drawings and try to do better.

The picture above is the start of introducing a lot of characters. The purpose of this is to introduce all four starting members of each party in the games, and that brings our total to eight. Besides what I already mentioned, this was ok.

But:

In this scene, I nixed my art, because the scene seemed to heavy for the busts. Unfortunately, while I see the resemblance in the sprites to my character art, a lot of other people just don't. I was originally thinking of putting a CG here, but cut it for how log that takes me. Now, I'm thinking, it must be done or this deep scene becomes meaningless.

#2 Animation is Weird

The ending also needs some tweeks, because it does look a bit weird with the animation.

I can't seem to make the sprite fade at a speed that shows that they are falling down a hole.

I'm not looking for perfection, but I want this to be easily understood at the very least.

And lastly,  #3 Optional Content

I wanted to have the player explore the House of Emeralds a bit, and let Aries and Alicia talk about their time here. Besides showing off extra rooms, the player will get to see how close they are as brother and sister.

Here are a few extra rooms:

In the end, Project Dawn needs rough edges smoothed, and just needs to work a little better as a game. Nothing is to be obtained here like exp or treasure, but discovering story and polished art is still worth playing for. I want more than anything for people to enjoy my games, and if that means I have to push it back, well ok. I will do my very best to complete and polish this introduction to my world, and hopefully, only push it back one month. Sorry I could not finish, but I will be sure to put out something a lot closer to my best quality soon. Thank you so much for reading and accompanying my on this journey!

PhoebeJ