Just thought I'd share a long overdue update. Both myself and friend handling the story and music on the project experienced some heart and adrenal gland-related health concerns last year that forced us to focus on that first; thankfully, we have an all-clear now and can have a sigh of relief to move forward. We'll be reconvening next month to push as hard as possible to get this finished this year...finally. It's taken so long (seriously, over 10 years...) I'm starting to think this project is cursed. 
- The core game is fully playable front-to-back with all features, bosses, etc. and even runs well on Steam Deck! If I had to put a percentile on how complete the overall package is, I'd say around 90-ish%, possibly higher.
- Numerous areas of polish have been added, including in animations, environments, textures and other misc. areas.
- A few older in-game tracks are going to be re-orchestrated to bring on par with quality of more recent arrangements.
- All cutscenes are fully rendered, polished and in-engine. We're halfway through sifting through hours upon hours of voice-over selecting final takes so we can then mix and master and ultimately bring into the engine. Everything is coded to load these externally based on the filename and line number once the final takes are rendered.
- Some music for cutscenes remains to be scored and we have a couple characters we added that will need voice-over recorded this year but it's very minimal by comparison.
- After final cutscenes are ready, they just need to be brought into the core game and connected to their triggers. At that point, the entire experience will be fully complete, front-to-back and we can begin outside bug-testing.
- I've performed lots of bug-testing in this gap period and fixing those as found but we will still have proper outside bug-testing once we have a final build. I have a few people lined up that are really good at breaking games so they'll help us sniff out things we may have missed.
- I'd love to release this year but it all just depends on how smoothly things goes in this final stretch. We want to have a minimum of a 3 month promotional period to raise interest in the game before release so release will depend all on when exactly that final build is complete.
- Updated demo will be released sometime this year, I'm sure.
