First playthrough

I just reached another milestone in the development of the game. I finished the first real playthough of the the game. For every chapter I collected things that have to be polished and bugs as well. I even implemented some quality of life improvements like the language selection and load / save screens. For example it is possible now to name your savegame instead of only having a time and date as the savegame name.

The game features seven chapters and five of them are already polished and called final by me. Chapter 6 still has some bugs and things to improve. Chapter 7 only needs a little bit of polishing (tweaking some camera angles and directions of where characters look at).

Playtime

While doing the first playthough I recorded the playtime of each chapter to be able to give some values when asked. I recorded the times under the following conditions / constraints:

• Played using an optimized walkthrough (perfect order of doing things)
• Not really solving any puzzles, but always using the right answers / codes / ingredients initially
• No optional actions (not looked at a single hotspot in any scene, not picked a single optional dialogue option)
• Always using the shortest walk paths and the perfect scene order while running all the time
• Not skipping any mandatory cutscenes or dialogues

That means that this playtime is the shortest time you need to play the game, but not a speedrun time, because that would involve skipping all cutscenes and dialogues and using any glitches that could be found.

The times I wrote down are the following:

"Looky - The Adventure", the freeware 2D predecessor that was released 2007 featured the chapters 0.5 to 2 and the playtimes that I got from players back then were around 5 to 7 hours. Since some things were added to those chapters gameplay-wise it should be even more now.

Doing the math that the perfect playtime is at 3 hours and the average time was around 5 to 7 hours I would take my recorded time times two which should result in an average playtime of

12 - 14 hours

for a player that never played the game before and has to puzzle his way through.

I still have some elements and puzzles for the last chapter that I discarded lately (one puzzle and a shooting minigame). Maybe I put them back in, but that would only add some additional minutes to the gameplay, but the last chapter has a bit to less interaction right now for my taste. Currently it's very cutscene heavy.

All in all I would call this game a long one while still being very varied. Not only because of the visual changes while travelling to different continents of planet Vermis, but also puzzle-wise. While for example chapter 2 is very inventory heavy with lots of combination puzzles, chapter 5 is more on the deductive side with you only carrying 2 inventory items the whole chapter.

Next steps

As I said above chapters 6 and 7 need a bit more polishing before I would call them final. After that I'll export all dialogue lines and other texts from the game to have them proof-read. Then the voice actors can start recording their parts while I will work on the English translation of the game and pick music for all scenes for chapters 3 to 7, as most of the scenes still don't have music or only some placeholder music tracks.

That said I don't think I will be finished until end of the year which means I have to move the release date once again. As I have a quite clear picture of what still has to be done and based on my experiences I would expect a release of the full game in Q1 2024. Maybe I will be able to hit the next Steam Next Fest in February for the release, which would be great.