It is finished, but not quite
Today I realized that one upside of doing these monthly updates is that I can remind myself what I did in any given Month, because to be honest, I had some trouble recalling what exactly I did in October.
I think the worse news of them all is that contrary to my announcement, I'm still posting too much. I tried to only limit myself to links and sort of promo-posts but it turns out it's actually those posts that annoy me the most, so in a way I made things worse for me. Videogames in general has also decided to be incredibly annoying and there is no better place to yell at no one in particular than Social Media.
Weirdly enough, one thing I changed that seem to have helped a lot with my mood is to not attach any links or call to actions to a post where I shared something I worked on. I figured this way I have much less to get irritated by, also for some reason posts without links seem to get more interactions. Obviously this might be sub-optimal for the numbers, but I think it's better to make something less-optimal but feel good about it, than being effective but miserable.
Anyways, this is only tangentially related to Eswahr Eternal, so instead let's answer the big question of what I was up in October:
I have ""finished"" the game! Obviously it's not actually finished, but it is playable from start until the end and there are almost no placeholders along the way.
Obviously I will not share any details, but I'm very proud of the game's final boss fight. I'm very curious to see how people will react to it though, because it is also very mean.
Once all that was done, I started work on the actual release preparation stuff. The inital plan was to create a playable game first, then use a Steam Next Fest as an excuse to create a Demo that ideally has as much polish as the entire finished product and after that is done, go and get the remaining game up to the same standard.
So a lot of work in the second half of October was put into updating art assets, specifically attack animations, but also some parts of the overworld tilesets as well.
I have also managed to write a pretty good boss fight theme just this past weekend. I've been listening to it on repeat for the past three days and I've yet to grow tired of it.
For the Demo, I actually figured that it might be a good idea to release an earlier, less polished version of it, to give myself a bit of a test run for the Next Fest. From the little feedback I have gotten from playtesters, the game seems to be pretty rough. Obviously that's part of the game's design, but there's intented roughness and unintented roughness. For the latter I need to have a better understanding where it happens and for what reason and that's not something I can do on my own. Same goes for finding bugs and parts where the game's systems aren't working as they should. I can do some of that work myself, but it's not ideal.
Obviously I could just use the Steam Next Fest for that, but after the awful first week I had with Virtue's Heaven's demo, I'd rather have most of the game's foundation sorted, before I throw it in front of the average Steam user.
There's still a few placeholders left to get rid of and one fight I want to do, but I'm fairly confident I can get that done before the Month is over. So I think there's a good chance that I'll release that 'first' Demo relatively sooon.
Regardless, Eswahr Eternal will most likely come out at some point in 2027. For better or worse, I can promise you that there aren't that many games like it out there, so please consider putting it on your Steam Wishlist!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5198420/Eswahr_Eternal/