March coding month is done and TAUtB now has a complete skeleton to work off of. There are still a few things that I'd like to clean up a bit more before moving too far into the next steps (the inventory system is basically hot-glued together atm), but there's a good frame there overall. April is all about writing and getting the quests pieced together into the main story. Currently, over half of the quests for the game have been designed and some dialogue has been written, but there's still a lot left to do.

The good news? This month is FUN.

The whole point of this game, while I haven't shared a lot yet, is to showcase the absolutely batshit crazy quests that go down in your mission to recover your parents. You might summon a bug conglomeration named Gordon, have an unfortunate enchilada dinner, start a competing pyramid scheme trade war, or maybe sabotage a restaurant just to ensure that a man never gets proper fish and chips. While there might be a lot of different ways to get your neighbors to move, there'll only be one path that gets a happy ending for everyone.

While April is a fun month, it also brings the most problems. SCOPE! There are a lot of ideas to add, but only so many can fit in the game if there's ever going to be a release. Each neighbor will have at least three different ways to get them to move, but as the quests become more unique, more art needs to be completed. Yeah, I could just do it as click-through dialogue boxes and crank this thing out, but what fun is that? Short insane cutscenes are the way to go. Skippable too? You betcha. There'll be replay value in seeing how different choices play out and nobody wants to rewatch the same scenes over and over while getting to the new stuff.

Speaking of cutscenes and art, the website will be more fleshed out and actually start to look normal sometime in May - Art month. Ugh. Now do I actually expect everything to be finished up at the conclusion of each of these months? Hahahahahahahahahaha... no. Especially not art month. To put it simply, I am NOT an artist. Am I getting better? Sure! Does it take me forever to do pixel art? OH MY GOD, YES. But, hey, practice makes perfect and all that, and I want to see a quality game release just as much as you do. Maybe around late December. It's way too early to tell, but that's the tentative plan.

Anyway, that's the April update! Back to work.