The image above depicts the Office Sellers Offices Lobby, an Easter Egg in my April Fools project.
Just a quick update to let you know that the first chapter of Pageturner 3 is finally finished. I only recently worked up the motivation to finally write all of it, probably because I finished playing Ace Attorney 6, which, as you'll be able to tell, is a source of inspiration.
This mystery definitely feels like an Ace Attorney mystery. It's very convoluted and has some fun twists. Definitely the best mystery I've written to date (I'm not counting the Broken Minds Sequel yet, as those mysteries are still being developed).
Hopefully this will set me on a "motivation streak", and I'll be able to finish writing the game. If you're thinking, "Yikes! Chapter One took this long?", well, there are a few factors. One was lack of motivation, for sure, but it's also a pretty long chapter. In terms of word count, it's longer than the entirety of Pageturner 2.
I'm not sure if the finished chapter will be as long, though. Depends on how fast you read, I guess. Pageturner 2 had more node game puzzles overall than PT3's first chapter, but since PT3's node puzzles are more evenly spread over the course of the entire game instead of all of them being dumped on you at the very end, that makes sense.
There will be three chapters in total. I expect Chapter 2 to be the longest one. I'm planning on including every chapter in one project, but if Scratch's file size limit becomes an issue, then I may have to split up the chapters into separate projects, which would be a pain.
It's already starting to affect the game in just the amount of investigating you're able to do. As I said, I have fourteen suspects, and twelve of them have cubicles that I modeled lots of props for. It's a shame, but you won't get a good look at most of them. I will release more images on this website, however.
The 50mb file size limit is Scratch's biggest downside. But it also keeps me from being too ambitious for my own good, and pushes me to try new things, like cloning sprites. There will be a lot of cloning in Pageturner 3, as I've finally got sort of a handle on how to do it properly. It does make a lot of the blocks extremely long, which makes them lag horribly, but that's a separate issue.
Soon I'll have enough material for Games Update 8.7 — the first official screenshot, for instance, which comes with a really awesome surprise (Wow, it's only been eighty-six updates? It feels like there should be way more).
I also want to officially announce the Broken Minds Sequel, and of course, Scratch 3.0 is on the horizon, so there's plenty to discuss.
Anyway, I'll try to get the Update out sometime this month.
— LockedOn, 2018.