Devlog TL;DR—

• BandCamp album updated & discounted!
• Embeds with art & story snippets on my website here!
• Game 2 scenes away from being built*!
• I played through all of it. Very confident in where it's at :)

*with placeholders, but built nonetheless.

As always, relevant stuff can be found at linktr.ee/amadeusgame to stay updated. Read on for details~

OST Update

First, SOMETHING FUN. To celebrate Amadeus reaching over 700 outstanding wishlists on Steam (what!!), and also to celebrate the fact that I am almost finished building the whole thing; I've updated the soundtrack album on BandCamp. It now:

• Contains every track in the current demo
• Preserves tracks from obsolete demos
• Costs $5 (but you can listen all you want for totally free)

I have also updated the "thank you for your support" page I built with the soundtrack embed, so it has all of this music with unique track art and overall better reflects what the game is now. If you want a way to experience the music and vibes of Amadeus without playing the game, this is probably the best way to do that! Check it out here: https://arcanaxix.com/PressKit/ost.html

(Disclaimer: it probably looks terrible on super high-res screens, please zoom in if that is the case. Forgive my janky webdev. Thank you in advance)

Development Status

Now—on to progress. As with the last few before it, this past month was spent building out 3 new scenes in the game to a state of "playable." The scripts are in with some revisions, a combination of final and placeholder assets were used to flesh them out, and the scenes exist now. I spent particular attention on the music implementation and timing for these ones (...including fixing a bug with the seamless looping mechanic and how it transitions between tracks) and I think that's feeling really effective.

I'm not saying much more because this is the juiciest part of the game. I don't want to set expectations or give things away in a development update before the game is even out, so I'm really holding back here. But there's nothing quite like finally getting to make the climax of this game after working on it somewhere between 2 and 3 years. It's so exciting!!

Pulling back from last month's specific goals, I also took one day and decided to play all the way through the game that I have built so far, from start-to-finish. I was starting to feel incredibly anxious about whether my "one hour before work each workday" development slots were in fact enough time dedicated to this game to actually finish it. I am very aware of how many placeholders and not-quite-fully-implemented mechanics are in the later scenes, in stark contrast to the early scenes that are fully polished and publicly available. I have been swimming in a sea of "not quite actually there" scenes, so the fear I'm not really making very much progress at all has been eating away at me.

So I decided to play it and know for sure. What state is the game in, really? How unfinished is it still? Is the writing as rough as I feel like it is?

Ohhh, I'm so glad I did this. Playing the game pretty much destroyed these fears. This game is going to be good. It is going to be good for a very particular audience, sure; but for those who are seeking what I am giving, it is going to be really special. It already is good. It already is special.

The music is great. The writing is great. The art is great. The seeds I am sowing for things that will happen much later are delicious. I laughed a couple times. And the combination of everything, in my completely mega-biased opinion, is something of a flavor completely unlike anything else out there. It is certainly inspired by very specific things, but the way they come together here is incredibly unique. I am so excited to share this with the world!

(Playing the game also had other uses. It helped me discover some bugs I didn't catch in some early scenes from edits I made to certain menu prefabs. It gave me a couple ideas on a few thematic items I can tie together a bit neater. The experience just generally gave me a good big-picture perspective that I really needed.)

And funny enough, it is this excitement and confidence, not the anxiety from before, that actually gets me to wake up a little earlier for even more development time on occasion. I started this devlog an hour before my Amadeus Slot(TM)  technically began today because I wanted to spend more time on it. Amadeus is very important to me, and dedicating time to it is important to me. Especially since I have a difficult-but-rewarding IRL job that interfaces a lot with trauma and other shit that sucks; Amadeus gives me something meaningful to work hard on that isn't so high-stakes, but is equally rewarding. It's necessary for me to stay sane. I am devoted to seeing it through to its 5-episode completion.

June Goals

For this coming month, my to-do list is very simple. I'm going to "finish" the game. Certainly not to a ready-for-publishing state, not even quite to a ready-for-playtesting state (although that should be coming soon after); but to a "you can technically play it from the very start to the very end and it contains the full experience" state.

What that means in practice is building out one last point-and-click scene, one last VN scene, and the credits. I'm looking forward to posting a devlog at the end of June that just says "WE DID IT GAMERS."

(Short aside - this next month I will also be writing some tracks for a friend working on the Toxic Yuri VN Jam, and said friend has encouraged me to go nuts and do wild shit, so that should be really fun. I will share the fruits of our labor when that is finished too.)

For today, that about wraps things up. Thank you for your continued interest!

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...Okay, one final aside. It was last June that I wrote a devlog about overcoming a massive internal hurdle by means of playing Sonic Adventure and remembering what matters to me in games, gaining a huge boost in confidence and returning to development with a vigor. This past month, I replayed Sonic Adventure again and overcame a similar hurdle. Coincidence???