Hey, folks. It's been a few weeks, so I figured it was about time to post a written update (plus a few in-progress screen shots) on the development progress for Mystery Machine.

I've broken the update into two releases, the first one shorter, labeled Mystery Machine (~1 hour), and  the second one longer, labeled The Curse of Whistler's Ghost (2+ hours), which should help with streamlining any necessary bugfixes and ironing out any back-end issues before I get too deep into the weeds with all the new animation stuff. 

Mystery Machine makes much greater use of the game engine for animations and visual effects, and there are a ton more animations and way more code involved than in Part I, which means a lot more to go wrong. I've been working very hard polishing everything as I've been coding, though, and so far it all looks and plays great (at least on this machine).

Currently, the first update release sits at just over 72% complete, with a likely release date about two weeks from today, around May 13th at the latest. It could be as early as the 6th if things go super smoothly, 

though it'll probably end up somewhere between the two. 

Mystery Machine is more of an ensemble piece than Part I, though Esther is very much the focus. The story continues right where Part I left off, though the tone is much lighter with a more staged presentation. Most of the visuals are comprised of animated sprites moving around large, panoramic backgrounds using Ren'py's 3D stage functionality.

Some scenes will use a pretty tricky combination of layered sprites, animated overlays, in-engine visual effects,  and full motion video, which honestly feels a bit risky and is kinda why I wanted to split this one up into two halves. As a lone dev I'm not able to test this stuff on a wide variety of systems and I'm really looking forward to seeing how that stuff gets along with everyone's hardware. 

I'm definitely gonna push this is hard as I can, but I do need to figure out where that upper limit is.

So, yeah. That's it. Keep an eye out in a week or two for the update, and I hope you all enjoy it. It's been a lot of fun to make.