Dear Shardians and the Golden City dwellers, happy May Day!

I hope this is your day off. Instead of busying yourself with your work, you can let yourself be entertained by ours. Here is a snapshot – with numbers – of how far Deathwish Bloom has come and how much is left to go. 

My optimistic plan is to release the Demo in winter 2025/2026. Demo length is less than 1/10th of the whole story but needs at least half of all game graphic assets. We will see most of the Golden City, but we won't be able to explore Shards and the world beyond until we make enough friends and gain enough authority. Which happens gradually over the course of the game. Art imitates life, right? 

As far as demo goes, here are the current numbers:

Character sprites: 7 out of 9 

Meet (left to right) Kyro, Elsa, Gabriel, Cody, Alice, Tyrrell and Mr Red. Some need a wardrobe update, but all have their set of facial expressions down. Nice. 

To Do: I am still refining the look of Sky (our MC) and her work boss. The game is written in first person, so we won't usually see the MC on screen. It's good to know what she looks like though, right? And, and –– all those romantic CGIs would need her face! 

Backgrounds: 6 out of 22

To Do: Almost the whole Golden City is still to be painted! If this game were a film script, half of the 22 locations would be cut out for budget reasons. Good thing we are not a film, as I find backgrounds refreshing and challenging to draw, which means... l̶o̶t̶s̶ ̵a̶n̶d̶ ̵l̶o̶t̶s̶ ̵o̶f̶ ̵f̶r̶u̶s̶t̶r̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶  growth. 

Music: hard to quantify at this stage – say, 5 of a minimum of 9?

I find music to be more important than artwork for setting the mood. Yet, commissioning music is something I have no experience with at all. My wildest dream would be to have all original human-made tracks – composed and recorded for the world Deathwish Bloom players would love living in. The reality is – so far – listening to hours of licensable music to select a couple of tunes that sound just right and being extra grateful to amazing Fionn Stafford who spent the little free time he had whipping up original music. So, the dream has come half-true and I'm looking forward to sorting out the rest.

To Do: Probably post on Discord something along the lines of 'If you're a composer and have some time on your hands, please contact me!'? Alternatively, see if I can get funding to cover this part. This is a later stage goal, when I have a playable demo, so that the composer knows what to aim for and there's trust in this project being continuously worked on.

Story: Got the story outline; Demo script is 1/4 written.

To Do: Finish Demo script. Get it proofread.

Announcement Trailer: 3/5 of the animation is done, and what a joy it was!

It was the first time I used Procreate Dreams, and I still feel I'll need to assemble the final sequence in After Effects – the trailer is long! Yet, every bit of making wee animations brings me a disproportionate amount of joy, which my animation skills certainly don't deserve. 

I remember meeting Father of Dragons himself, Dan Katcher, who talked about his job of creating dragons for Game of Thrones. He said his workdays were 'living the dream'. Come to the office. Sit down. Draw scales all day. Stand up. Go home. 

And now I get that! Get up. Sit at the desk. Paint plant scales half a day. Raise the sit-stand desk. Paint plant scales for the rest of the day. Bliss! (Please tell me if you can relate; there must be a few of us like that. I hope.)

To Do: finish the remaining 2/5 of the trailer, which are a CGI of us meeting our love interest and snippets of gameplay against backgrounds which are not drawn yet (see: Backgrounds 6 of 22, 😩😩).

Steam Page: as soon as I have the trailer and the music to go with it! 

Marketing:

www.sharpglassgames.com is up

https://sharpglassgames.itch.io/deathwish-bloom is up 

Of social media accounts, I settled on regularly updating these two:

www.instagram.com/deathwishbloom

https://bsky.app/profile/sharpglassgames.com

Programming:

Will start right after completing the Demo Script. 

Relationship System:

Deathwish Bloom has a more complex relationship system than Like/Dislike. The whole game is a game of diplomacy – figuring out what other characters would die for and support or derail their lives, while enjoying or dreading the consequences. This has to be figured out before writing the script. 

May 2025 tasks:

Min: Finish Announcement trailer animation – complete three backgrounds which you'll see in the trailer: face the most challenging animation part – meeting our love interest. 

Max: Commission trailer music. Figure out the relationship system. 

Hope reading this little summary was a tad bit of fun for you!

See you in June! 🌸