There are 2 big highlights I'd like to celebrate from last month in this update:

1. Women's Day Sale (huge marketing boost)
2. Development Progress (exciting stuff)

Women's Day Sale

Amadeus was part of the WINGS Women's Day Sale on Steam last month. I mentioned having some complicated feelings about participating, but in the end I am incredibly glad that I did and very grateful for the opportunity. The Women's Day Sale was the single biggest marketing/visibility boost that the game has ever had. It blew Next Fest out of the water! The sale brought the game's outstanding wishlists on Steam from around 420 to around 680, which absolutely blasted past a major milestone (500) I was optimistically hoping to maybe get by the game's launch. Being at nearly 700 outstanding wishlists feels a little absurd.

I've been working on an updated thank-you for reaching that milestone, but it's not ready yet. In the meantime, I would like to say "thank you women."

Development Progress

Every month, my goal has been to build out 3 new scenes to a fully-playable state. This past month was special because it was the first time that every single scene I built was completely new, and not iterating on some version of an existing scene. It's finally starting to feel like I'm building the whole game I have planned rather than just the start of it.

For those of you who have stuck around since the very first versions of the Amadeus demo, you're probably familiar with a scene where you walk around the old watchtower pointing-and-clicking at things. That scene isn't included in the demo anymore, because I've added so much more to the start of the game—and to that scene itself—that including it would give away too much. Nevertheless, that scene was redone in February. As of March, every scene I've been working on is one that nobody else has seen before.

We are officially INSIDE THE WATCHTOWER.

(Not to compulsively mention Sonic the Hedgehog in every single devlog for my angsty werewolf visual novel, but I do think listening to "Kingdom Valley" from Sonic 06 on repeat while drawing the inside gave the atmosphere a little je ne sais quoi.)

This has got me really excited. I'm finally realizing ideas that I've had planned for ages but have been stuck as mere first-draft scripts while I worked on getting the early scenes right. It was very important for me to iterate so much on the introduction for so long, because this allowed me to finalize my mechanics (and art direction and narrative and UI...) and get it in front of a lot of people as a demo I'm proud of. But now that I'm confident in the game's direction, I'm finally able to build the rest of it, and it's so exciting. The part I worked on last month is deep into the "rising action" of Episode 1. The things I've been working on are JUICY.

I'm even more excited about this upcoming month. My favorite scene in the entirety of Episode 1 is on April's to-do list. It's not the climax, necessarily, but it's my favorite part. If I were a player, it's the scene that would change my opinion on this game from "oh, this is interesting" to "I might actually be obsessed with this." I don't know what kind of impact it will have on others, but it's deeply important to me and to the story's major themes, so I absolutely cannot wait to build it. A lot of the dynamic music functions I've made already (seamless looping with reverb tail, fading different layers in and out) were created specifically because I knew I would need them for this scene.

Short aside, I have put my dynamic music Unity scripts on Github in case anyone else hates Wwise as much as I do: https://github.com/ArcanaXIX/UnityScripts/

I'm hesitant to share too much from my work last month, because I want most of what happens after Amadeus visits the watchtower to be a surprise. I WILL announce that we're gonna be adding a little bassoon to the list of live instrument performances in the soundtrack!

(I met the bassoon performer in question at MAGWest and am really excited to have them on the project. It's impossible to overstate how much of a positive influence tabling at MAGWest has had on the latter stages of development for this game.)

I will also say this: Amadeus: A Riddle for Thee ~ Episode 1 ~ Waltz is a linear game. Any "decisions" that may present themselves are different paths to ultimately reach the same conclusion.

But.

I have—very sparingly—implemented some of these "decisions."

Speaking too much on their purpose will give away too much, so I will hold back.

Just know that my target audience is those with stubborn hearts who dislike being told what to do.

(In this same vein, I intend to tweak the initial controls tutorial in the first scene at Dartmaure in the final version of the game to reflect this. But I'm getting ahead of myself...)

Thank you all for your continued interest and support. The game is actually close enough to being finished that I'm getting kind of nervous. But there's more to do before that time comes, so for now, I will keep on working at it!