Hiya! Today, we have some exciting updates on the current status of development for WORLD ENDS WEDNESDAY!

Our Steam page has new screenshots! Every single one has been updated, so go take a look!

For the last couple months, our team has been focusing on polishing Chapter 1. We have now begun doing playtesting of our game with people outside of the development team! In this playtesting, we have been able to find and fix a ton of bugs that we have never found previously. We have also been getting a lot of feedback on things that we should add or adjust. We are taking their feedback into account, and adjusting Chapter 1 to be an overall better and higher quality experience. We are also happy to say that as of posting this progress update, we are planning to start active development of Chapter 2 in April! I have high hopes that development of future chapters will progress significantly faster, as a good chunk of Chapter 1’s development was spent building a lot of the core systems of our game. We also had a less solidified plan of the overall game when starting. Specifically for Chapter 2, I don’t anticipate any major changes to be made while working on this chapter. We have had a very specific idea in mind for this chapter since the early concepting days, and this game has a segment that I have been INCREDIBLY excited to make.

COMBAT
First off, here is an updated look at a battle in WORLD ENDS WEDNESDAY:

A lot has changed since the last screenshot of combat has been shared. The combat of our game uses input based attacks to deal more damage to enemies. Different attacks have different prompts, so be prepared when selected which attack you would like to use! You can even use inputs to block damage, though these attacks are not prompted when to block. You have to learn the timing of attacks in order to beat enemies!

We also have a new meter in the top left! What is this meter for? Well, maybe that’s something we can share more about at a later date…

We are still currently working more on animations, so we are going to hold off on showing it in motion today. However, animation progress has been moving forward! We hope to show off combat in the very near future! (Trailer plans are still on track!)

MUSIC:
Most of the OST for Chapter 1 has been completed! Today, we would like to show a sneak peak of 3 songs from our game!

First, we have our Battle Theme, composed by wwhhooami! Take a listen!
Next, we have the Woodlands Theme, composed by Antick!
Lastly, we have a Boss Theme, composed by Pablo Heckman (ExpoDev)!
This is just an early taste of the music for our game! We are excited to share more tracks created by all three of these talented composers! We also have other tracks being composed by another composer, so stay tuned!

Visual Updates:
Chapter 1 has recently had a visual overhaul in all of the outdoor areas. We originally planned this area to be very Fall themed, but we noticed that some of our design choices didn’t match the original vision. We have adjusted the colors of this area, and even redid the tree sprites entirely to better fit our vision. Here is a before and after.
Progress
Next, I would like to share the progress rates of Chapter 1.
➤ Programming: 95%
➤ Art: 75%
➤ Audio: 75%
➤ World Design: 95%
➤ Writing: 95% / 50% Side Content

This will likely be the final completion rate update for Chapter 1 until every category is 100%. In terms of Chapter 1, most of our team is working on wrapping up specific parts of the game, and polishing where needed. Programming wise, we are making bug fixes and working on stat balancing. We are also working on a handful of battle changes based on feedback we got during our private playtest. While we will probably continue to make changes to Chapter 1 over the next couple months, we are going to be starting work on Chapter 2 alongside polish for Chapter 1

Thank you all again for the support for our game! Over the coming months, we are planning to be more active on our social media and share more frequent updates! If you want to keep up to date on our game, please check out our Twitter @Chopbusters! Also, go subscribe to our YouTube channel! Not much is there at the moment, but we will be posting more in the coming months!

Until next time!

Happy New Year!

Today we would like to share a brief update on the current status of development for WORLD ENDS WEDNESDAY.

Our team has been continuing work on finishing the first chapter of the game. We had the goal to make the first chapter of our game beatable by the end of 2023. We are very excited to announce that we have reached that goal as of a few days ago! However, beatable is defined by being able to run through the area and see the story to the end. This does not include having entirely finished art, bug polish, finished music, NPCs, side quests, etc. While we are very close to hitting a big milestone, we still have quite a lot of work still to fully wrap up Chapter 1. We are currently aiming to finish the chapter before the end of Q1 2024. We have something planned to reveal once we finish this section of the game, so be on the lookout!

CLOUD SAVES
We mentioned on our Twitter a few months ago that we are working on making sure WORLD ENDS WEDNESDAY runs well on Steam Deck! As of right now, there are no noticeable differences between running our game on PC and Steam Deck (as it should be). However, I was started to get a little annoyed having separate save files from my PC and my Steam Deck while testing. This got me to finally enable cloud saving for our game on Steam! While this was always a feature I intended to implement, I am happy to say it is now implemented and being tested across different platforms. I have been able to start a playthrough on my desktop, then continue it in bed on my Steam Deck with no issues! I hope others will get to experience our game this way, as I do this with a lot of games I play on Steam.

COMBAT
In October, we said we planned to show off the combat before the end of the month. That did not happen for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that we are still waiting to polish up art in this area. We want to show it once it is in a form we expect to ship the game as. The reason we are not to that point yet is due to personal life obligations that kept us from completing this section. Another reason is that I decided to implement some new features into battles that make the battles more engaging, and I wanted to implement those first. As of writing this post, most battle mechanics have been implemented, but we would like to hold off showing the combat until it is more polished.

PROGRESS
Next, I would like to touch on progress completion rates of Chapter 1.
➤Programming: 90%
➤Art: 40%
➤Audio: 20%
➤World Design: 90%
➤Writing: 95% Main Story / 25% Side Content

We have recently been hiring composers to create the soundtrack of WORLD ENDS WEDNESDAY, so now the audio section has made some progress. While there is still quite a lot of music missing as of writing, we are working with some incredibly talented people to fill out the missing songs.

Programming for this chapter is almost complete! Every feature I intend to be in this chapter is implemented. The 10% that is left is mostly bug testing and small things here or there! World design also had a huge jump in percent completed. The big section we were working on last update is mostly complete now! There is just a small part of the map we still need to make a final plan for, and it will be done!

Thank you everyone for the patience you have shown waiting for our game. We are gearing up for a super busy 2024! We have a LOT of plans for the first half of the year that we are super excited to share when the time is right. Currently we are aiming for our first trailer to drop within the first half of 2024. Will we have more than one trailer this year? More than likely!

Please make sure to follow @Chopbusters on Twitter to keep up to date on new information on WORLD ENDS WEDNESDAY.