The Vertigo demo was a big hit, even though, looking back on it, it was complete garbage. I suppose people saw its potential to grow into a less-garbage game, which it has. Hopefully? The demo really marked the point in which we set our sights on a much larger scope. We now aimed to have an hour or two of single-player story driven exploratory gameplay. Lots of mechanics were tightened for a while, and soon we felt ready to start working on the real content.

Level one is short and sweet. It has an introduction to the mechanics and first weapon, some simple combat, and then a disproportionately difficult boss fight. I like it.

As we continued working on content, George and I realized two things. One was that each level was taking much longer to make than we anticipated. Another was that each level took much longer to play than we thought. This was good, as we were going to meet our goal of gameplay length at about the same time as planned, but if we released when we had 2 hours of gameplay we would have been about a tenth of the way through the story. This wasn't good. We expanded our scope again.

Vertigo would have multiple chapters, two or three, we aren't sure, and they would be cut like a series of books. Each one would be a full, proud game, but together they make the full story arc. The first one, with 5 levels corresponding to the five floors you explore in the game, was last reported at about 4 or 5 hours long by our testers. This was when it only had about 3 levels! It now has all 5 levels in a very close to finished state, and we're just working on more puzzles, more challenges, more decoration, making the level design a bit more engaging, and the like.

We're almost done. Recently, we let out the final release trailer, with an optimistic estimate about release date.