An entirely new demo for Of Love and Eternity is available right now to download on both Steam and right here on Itch!

This is a very significant update because it represents the new scope of the game as I continue on to its completion. If you've been following the development, you might have picked up that I haven't had the easiest time these past few years. To put it plainly, before I had released the first demo, I lost my mom to cancer. The entire experience leading up to and since her death left its mark on all of us and in my case, had me feeling apprehensive about continuing work on a project where the contemplation of death was central to its theme. Not only did I feel uncomfortable touching on the subject through my work, but I also found that daily exposure to the concepts and imagery of death made me more paranoid than ever about my own mortality and the safety of my family. This stress went unchecked as I continued working but after a while it had mounted to a point where I was finding it difficult to focus and ended up stepping away from the project altogether.

During my break, I turned my attention towards my own physical and mental health and spent my time dreaming up other projects I could work on instead. But as time went on and the fate of this project became uncertain, I started feeling guilty about abandoning something I had put so much energy into. I had made something many people came to love and be inspired by and it would be such a shame to let that slip away. After a talk with my wife, I decided it was time to get back on the horse. We went over all the pain points of the project and for each of those points, came up with a solution. In the time since that talk, I redesigned the game, changed the scope, started a Patreon page, and called an old friend. What I have now is a game I'm not afraid of anymore and the real means to finish it.

And that's what I share with you today - the result of all that change and growth in my life and the resurrection of a story that might never have been told. I don't think the content of the demo is quite worth all those platitudes but it represents the new Of Love and Eternity I have planned and will give you a truer look at what the full game will be like. Where the first demo was a collection of ideas all tossed into one vertical slice, this new demo is the actual Act 1 of the game completely remade from the ground up. While it may not be as eventful or visually diverse as the first demo, it is a much more deliberate experience and all the subsequent areas I have planned will be visually unique and full of their own surprises.

What's new with the project? Well, like I mentioned before, one of the bigger pain points was the game's scope. The way I had set out to make the game originally put a lot more on my shoulders than I could follow through with. Because of this, I had another look at the game's overall design and after a while, came up with a bunch of changes I could make to streamline the game and make finishing it a lot more practical. Many of the major changes I made had the biggest effect on how much more content I would need to produce to finish the game. Instead of trying to fulfill all my lofty ambitions, I looked at what I already had in terms of assets and features, and designed the game around that. Once I limited myself in that respect, an actual game began to appear in my mind and I became much more optimistic.

With a clearer picture of what my game could be, I thought I would start out by tying off the biggest loose ends I had left myself since stepping away from the project - the remaining animated cutscenes. Since starting my Patreon in May of last year, a lot of work went into finishing all the cutscenes and as of early August, they are all done! These cutscenes are mainly the bookend scenes for the final act so they don't actually show up in the demo but it feels great to have the all ready for when I get to those scenes. My biggest takeaway from completing these animations is that things tend to get overinflated when they sit around in our minds for too long. In this case, even though these animations were the task I dreaded most to start, it only took me about a month or so of part-time work to finish them (not counting the storyboarding process).

After knocking out the cutscene animations, I moved on to creating a modular tileset for the environment. This ended up being a huge undertaking, consisting of well over 120 different tiles, but well worth the effort in the end. Map creation was one of the bigger pain points I wanted to resolve for this iteration of the game as in the original demo, I was using a single bespoke mesh for each map. This approach was not sustainable as each area had to be made from scratch, adjustments had to be done in Maya then re-imported, and any large-scale changes would mean a lot of extra work. Now, with the modular tileset at my disposal, I can more freely create and make adjustments to any number of area maps all without leaving the editor. For the first time ever, I feel like an actual professional game developer, able to produce large scale environments and easily make iterative changes as I go along.

While I was developing the tileset, I was also in talks with an old friend of mine who agreed to help out with the new level design. In the same spirit of addressing pain points, level design was something I never managed to wrap my head around, as exemplified in the aimless maze we got in the first demo, so I was happy to have an official level designer on the project. Together we went over the new design of the game and built a map layout that would complement that. For this first area in particular, it's mainly meant to teach the player their means of progression through exploration and use of the fireflies. Later areas will introduce other mechanics but we'll get to that some other time.

All these changes being made to the game's design called for some additional features to be implemented as well. One of the biggest things I worked on was the new system for loading and saving. Before, the game would save when the player entered into a new scene and simply load that scene whenever they continued their game. Because the areas were so small and there wasn't much to do in them, it wasn't too big of a deal to just reload the scene anew whenever the player left and came back to the game. Now however, the levels are meant to be much longer with this new first area being several times larger than all the areas in the original demo combined. Since the player is free to quit whenever they feel, the game needed a nicer solution to saving and loading progress. What I ended up with is a checkpoint system the player can trigger while exploring. The checkpoint saves all the player's progress so that when they load back into the game, they start right back at the last checkpoint they visited in the same state they were in when they visited it.

There are plenty of other things I've added to and changed about the game since restarting the project but there's no way I could mention them all here, especially considering the length of the post already. Instead I'll touch on one more item that might be interesting to know about. After a bit of feedback from an early playtest, I finally added in a few more settings in the options menu. Those settings being a way to set the framerate, vsync count, and camera movement sensitivity. I can't confirm this myself but apparently the original demo was running at an uncapped framerate which in some cases caused unexpected gpu activity in certain scenes like the main menu. Now with the framerate locked at 30 by default and with the option to switch to 60 or 120 as well, the game seems to utilize your computers resources more responsibly.

If you made it this far, thank you very much for reading! I didn't expect to get so carried away at the beginning but I feel like all of you here deserve a bit of an explanation for this long break I took between updates. The main thing is that the project is in much better shape now and the game is well underway to being released sometime this year. In the mean time, look forward to more updates on the project and be sure to follow me wherever you can so we can stay in touch. Also, if you would like to and are able, consider checking out my Patreon. I mentioned earlier that there was no way I could include everything in this post, but throughout this whole experience I've made sure to update patrons with detailed developer logs that go over all my progress, personal thoughts, and any news just about every week. I also include screenshots and video whenever I can as well as provide early game builds when they are ready so if that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to have a look at my page.

patreon.com/acornbringer

And that's that! I'm happy to be back, I'm feeling optimistic, and I really hope you all enjoy the new demo! Take care and I'll see you soon.