I still don't update enough, here or elsewhere. This is my curse. I have it in my head that I need to have enough to say before it's worth updating, and in turn create an expectation for myself of long and detailed posts covering large swathes of information. That's stupid! I'm sorry!

That said, there has been plenty of progress on South of the March over the last few months.

Progress Updates

• All of the core background art finished (even beyond the demo)
• Various UI buttons added for navigation clarity (mostly back/close buttons)
• New post-battle UI to better communicate experience gain and level-ups
• Alternate KO art for when you're losing your battles
• Building out the self-voicing feature during battle.

The new post-battle UI, now with progress bars

Final Steps for the Demo

All this puts us pretty firmly in the last steps before a demo release, hopefully within the next few weeks. I'll probably just launch it out of nowhere with minimal fanfare, because this obviously isn't a marketing-first endeavor. More importantly, my biggest goal with the demo is just to get feedback.

Complete Self-Voicing

There are a few scraps of art left to get in there, but the biggest thing I'm trying to smooth out before the demo is the self-voicing functionality. A basic self-voicing feature (for blind or low-vision players) is built into the Ren'Py engine, but this game is so thoroughly customized that the vast majority of the self-voicing is being done manually; the engine defaults are mostly only working during dialogue.

Controls overview, including self-voicing-only

Battle in particular is a major challenge and fully custom-built. I've spent a lot of time trying to make it something a person could navigate using only audio cues, but given the inherently stat-heavy UI of turn-based combat, it's complicated. I really should have gathered some feedback before I put this much time into polishing it, because as a relative outsider to the needs of such a system, I'm very aware of the possibility that the feedback could be something like, "hey, you should start over." But hey, I like to live on the edge.

Next steps coming soon, then. Keep an eye out!