I've been meaning to update you all here for a few months but wanted to wait until I found my footing and collected my thoughts on the whole thing. I can't say I'm quite there yet but since I have a game update to push, I might as well take the time to fill you all in as well.

Back in early August, my wife and I decided to separate after ten years together and six years of marriage. As a consequence, I left the place I had made my home in Brazil to move back with family in the United States. If you'd like to have a better understanding of what happened, I created a pair of public posts on my Patreon before and after travel. You can read those here: Challenging Times (Patreon post), and Update From New England (Patreon Post). If you are familiar with my work, you might have known that Of Love and Eternity is directly inspired by that relationship of ours. I took our own star-crossed love, my fears and doubts, and redirected those feelings into a game. As you could imagine, returning to a project after losing touch with that part of my life has been incredibly challenging and despite having pushed on through these past few months, it still weighs on my heart. Regardless, I can't give up on this dream of mine when I know it means so many different things to so many other people. While the source of my inspiration has gone, it doesn't make those themes any less important - especially to those of you who have connected with the game in your own personal ways. With this in mind, the project goes on.

Now, as for this update: At the moment, I just rebuilt the demo from the latest version of the project. In this way, it will carry over all the latest progress and features while still being fairly similar to the demo you might have already played. On top of that, I also went back through the first area and made some specific changes thanks to feedback. The largest thing you might notice is Area 1 has been shortened up. Later areas I created became more compact so the first area began feeling stretched by comparison. With the change, I think this demo will leave a better impression on new players since it's a bit more to the point and has less of those long stints of walking before reaching points of interest.

Another large addition to the demo as a consequence of all the new updates is death. Because death wasn't fully implemented before, I made it impossible to die in the demo. With death and the Spirit World complete, I reset the enemy damage and made it possible to be killed in this new demo. The way death now works is that when you lose too much health, the main character dies and wakes up in the Spirit World. From this area, you are free to explore and find a couple of ways to respawn. I'll leave that up to you to figure out but once you do respawn, you wake back up close to where you had died and continue on your way.

And I think the last big feature added to the full game that shows up in the demo would be crouching. Crouching was added in for the third area of the game where you explore a farm and try to avoid enemies positioned throughout. Subsequently this feature also allowed me to create hidden passages in some of the levels that you can only access by ducking into. Since the gameplay consists mostly of walking, I thought this extra bit of interaction would help break up the monotony in at least some small way. While there's really only one spot in the demo where you need to crouch, I plan on goin back and adding in these little moments all throughout the game.

I know there's plenty more little things that will appear in the demo, but those are the most impactful changes. Actually the bulk of my time these past few months has been spent creating the later areas of the game and mechanics that we will see there. At this point in time, and not counting the new Spirit World and transitional areas, there are two new areas completed with a third in the works. Those transition areas being the shorter maps leading up to main area maps. The demo includes an example of one of these areas before the final cutscene where the main character enters the swamp. The idea is that all the main areas will have these intro areas leading up to them, creating a bridge to span the gap between environment types.

My next steps to finish the content of the game are the two remaining areas. This will include those transition areas and campfire scenes. I may also create a "depths" type area like the one you might fall into in the demo if I find a nice place to put it. After that, there are the four ending cutscenes to decorate and script. Currently the two simpler ones are complete and the remaining ones will need some unique assets to be created before I can finish them. And speaking of the cutscenes, each of those will need their own unique music and sfx track before I can call them done. In fact, there is a whole other bunch of sfx and music for the end half of the game that will need to be commissioned. I'm estimating it will be a similar amount of both music and sfx to what is currently in use in the game.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was that this release is preceding the release of a pre-order work-in-progress version of the game. The idea is that you can purchase the game at a discount now, play what is currently finished - along with any subsequent updates, then when the game launches in full, you will already have it in your library. It's something I'm only doing here on itch as a way to give something more substantial to those who would like to support development. The reality of my situation - having moved back to the United States - is that I'm not stable and very much need to find work apart from game development. Because of that, I'll have even less time to work on Of Love which will drag out development even further. So in case some folks would like to keep up to date with a developing build of the game, it might just mean I can take a few less hours at work and spend on finishing Of Love.

And with that, thank you all for your continued encouragement and support of my work even after all this time and through all these ups and downs. It really means everything to me to have people around who are excited about the project and take the time to let me know that what I'm doing is something special to them.

Before I let you go, I'll just add my Patreon here in case some of you were unaware how else you could support my work. I post there most of all and when I get time, I even create exclusive tutorials and other nice things for patrons. Check it out if you're curious!

patreon.com/acornbringer

Thanks so much for reading all this and I hope to see you around!

P.S.

I recently started streaming on Twitch so if you'd like to catch me playing a game or working on Of Love and Eternity, be sure to subscribe there so you get a notification when I go live! I'll also announce my streams on Discord and social media so keep an eye out. And yeah, that's my name there. Acorn Bringer was taken for whatever reason.

twitch.tv/megalazerpunch