Happy Vaneltine’s Day, we hope your holiday season went well and has been winding down comfortably! It’s been a while since we’ve been in touch.

To change that, we’re planning on starting up these blog posts to come every other Sunday with a more focused look on the things we’re working on in the moment, rather than the general descriptions of how what we’re working on is done. For example, tonight we’ll be showing off some scripting tests taking place in Pennyburg.

This place…

We’re putting birds in Pennyburg.

The test isn’t being passed just yet.

A major part of the work when it comes to making Mother 4 is scripting. While Dave does all of the engine-side programming, it’s up to the rest of the team to use Dave’s scripting syntax to create stuff like birds that respond to the player and people for the player to talk to. Cutscenes, story progression, and scene transitions are all handled through scripting. Yes, even birds are handled this way.

They could potentially do a lot.

A lot of what we’ve been working with this past season has been implementing the full range of these scripting actions and putting them to work.

Which results in birds behaving like birds.

That kind of brings us to our next point… we aren’t done with the game. Aiming for a launch date has been a lot of bad guess work and unexpected circumstances, but the long and short of everything is that we moved too soon - we were excited to share what we were working on and the things we’d already accomplished. While we have the majority of assets for the project complete, completing the game itself with all assets assembled and tested and polished is no small task.

At our current clip, we can probably finish one major area per month, while things like maps between major areas (think of places like the caves connecting Twoson to Peaceful Rest Valley) are much faster jobs… and while things do happen we will be aiming for about this pace.

So while it will be a bit more of a wait we aren’t about to show you something we won’t finish or aren’t working on. We can’t thank you folks enough for your understanding and excitement… you’re all why this is being made. Please bear with us, and we’ll see you again on February 28th!