October 2025 Update - Chapter 4 CompletE?????????

Hello! I am basically finished with Chapter 4 of Case 3 of the Clockwork Spire after 2 and a half months of work. This work also included a lovely rewiring of Chapters 1-3 (which definitely did not cause me agonising pain) and a realisation that I'm going to have to be a bit more engaging with my playtesters. Thankfully I have some people to force I mean do it I mean help me do it for me... yeah.

Don't mind the fact that this screenshot has the old name for Chapter 4. Maybe I should've gotten off my arse and actually taken a new screenshot instead. But nope, this is what I had.

Chapter 4: The Phantom of Truth is definitely the longest one I've made yet, in spite of my attempts to make it as light and airy as possible, and cut out as much unessecary dialogue/reveals as needed.

In fact, I even cut out an entire scene that would've taken you to the courthouse archives for the sake of brevity. I will instead include it in Chapter 7, where it will feel less forced and/or pace-breaking. At least I have a screenshot to show for it:

I wonder who's seal that is. I wonder what her deal is.

Anyway.

The next step in the development process is working on Chapters 5 and 6, which are both trial chapters and by comparison MUCH MORE EASY TO WRITE. Trial chapters are by their very nature just a straight shot from A to B with only minor divergence with the questioning segments where you can press statements and be wrong when presenting items.

Chapter 6 is going to feature you questioning a ghost. Don't worry about it.

I now also have basically all character designs down pat. I am very proud of them all and have a lot of ideas for how to get the most out of them. My most recent character designs were a secretary that my two closest dev buddies both called hot as soon as I added a pair of reading glasses to her sketch. I am not making this up, even as I am writing these words with them in a VC call.

The character(s) on the right have a bit more plot signifcance, to the point where I am going to not reveal his name. If I did, I'd probably be showing my hand about how I do character design and media inspiration a bit too early. Though I can absolutely reveal that the cat he's holding is named "Doris" and she's based on an actual IRL cat adopted by one of my friends. And yes, the wide-eyed look of absolute shooketh-tude is very accurate to how she is in real life.

And I think that's all I have to talk about for this dev update.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep up this habit of writing blog posts to give the semblance of a coherent developement process.

Thanks for reading
Quill, CreativeOutOfBoundsException.