I’ve made the decision to delay Nocturne to 2024.
I’d like to give detailed insight into the reasons for the delay, but if you’re looking for the quick summary:

The complexity of the game has become higher than anticipated.
We rebuilt more fundamental pieces of the game than originally planned.
There’s a lot of art to draw.
I’m bad at estimating how long games take to build.

While the development is taking longer than expected, I’m really happy with the progress that’s been made so far, and we’re currently working towards a build that can be playtested by the community for feedback.

If you missed the development update posted last year, check it out

The complexity of the game has become higher than anticipated.

Some features seem simple at first, but can add complexity later in development. As one example, the choice to have enemies physically roam the overworld instead of random encounters, seemed like a simple change...

This meant each enemy in the game now required four unique directional sprites with a walking animation. In Prelude, enemies only needed one downward facing sprite for combat. This increased the total enemy art needed by a significant amount.

Next, we built a pathfinding system to handle how enemies navigate the map, and a system of rules about how they chase and engage with the player.

This created a lot of edge cases:

What happens if the player climbs a ladder while being chased by an enemy?
Should enemies climb ladders too, or wait at the bottom?
What about flying enemies, can they engage players on ladders?
What happens if the player starts a cutscene while being chased?
What if two enemies collide with the player on the same frame?
If the player is standing on a layer above the enemy (such as a bridge) while being chased, how does the enemy pathfind up to the higher layer, instead of just running around frantically below?
If the enemy disengages from a chase, should it remain where it is on the map, or return to its previous position?
Can enemies re-engage the player while still returning to its previous position?
What happens if the player moves an object or closes a door that traps an enemy?
… etc

Each of these edge cases requires design, implementation, testing and iteration to solve. Hopefully this example shows how seemingly simple features can actually be a lot of work.

We rebuilt more fundamental pieces of the game than originally planned.

Prelude was the first chapter of the game. It was naive of me to assume the timeline for building Nocturne would be <time to build prelude X number of chapters>.

Game development timelines aren’t on a linear scale, and there were many systems in Prelude that simply didn’t scale to the size we need for Nocturne.

For example, Prelude had a system to determine if a cutscene would play. I could set a series of conditions the game would check, such as “Is Kimothy with you?”, or “Have you seen this other cutscene yet?”. The system was a little clunky to use, but for the scale of Prelude, it worked out just fine.

For Nocturne, a game that’s almost ten times the scale of Prelude, the number of conditions cutscenes need has grown exponentially. Turning what used to be a slightly clunky system, into something completely impractical. Bug testing why a cutscene doesn’t play correctly has become akin to diving into a haystack, not being sure if there’s even a needle to find.

So we built a new system that works for Nocturne’s scale, one that visualizes the path the cutscenes will take in real time as you’re testing the game, so we immediately see if something isn’t correct, and on exactly which step things went wrong.

There’s a lot of art to draw.

With the new art style, the time it takes to draw everything in the game has increased. It’s important to me that every enemy has a unique visual design. It’ll result in a longer timeline for the game, but it’s a trade off that’s worth it to me.

The new map design also does away with the tile based layout of Prelude, which makes each environment more bespoke and detailed.

To keep up with the art required, I’ve hired two more artists to work on the game and as a result we’ve really picked up pace on the art side. As thanks for reading this far, here’s a little preview:

I’m bad at estimating how long games take to build.

The reality is, I’ve only built one game before, which was Prelude. I made the mistake of using Prelude’s timeline to estimate Nocturne’s timeline, and for the reasons above, that didn’t work out. I wanted to include this section because the truth is, I just made a mistake with the estimate. While I’ve learned lots about managing a project of this scale over the last few years, timelines are hard, and it’ll take more experience before I can make better estimates.

Thanks to everyone who’s excited for the game, and look out for the playtesting build soon™.