Where Things Stand — March 2026
I started this project on 10-05-2025 and I have a planned release date of 10-15-2026. This may or may not change because who knows what the future holds but I feel like 1 year of development time is a solid goal to give myself. Below is roughly what I have planned, this timeline for each thing will be rough numbers because I'm learning game dev as I go so I'm not sure how hard or time consuming each system/thing will be to create how I want it but we'll see and as always I'll share my dev progress on my various socials and stuff!
Establish Characters and Animations
(4 months)
Right now I have my main charcter, 7 playable characters, and will create 8 main enemy npcs that are shadow opposites of my main playable characters. I still need to create more NPCs to fill in the world. I need to create normal villagers, more enemies, figure out a main enemy, create unique bosses, create tonsss of more characters in general! And none of that is mentioning creating the animations for each character! I'm slightly against using already made assets because for my first game I want it to be all me so we'll see how long this truly takes. Creating animations will be one of my main hurdles I think.
Create more building assets
(2 months)
I cooked with my moon, buildings, and terrain I've made thus far but it's absolutely not enough. I need more variance and crazier proportions! I need to create the main hub castle, figure out how I want to organize my world and set everything up and figure out how I want the open world and instanced levels to play in together. Lottttts of world and level building to do here!
Create and establish the combat system
(???)
So as you progress the story you encounter and acquire the 7 main allies that will be fighting alongside you. For exmaple, you're playing as the main character and you've acquired 3 of the 7 allies. When you enter into combat, of course you're free to act as you please but your companions will instantly go into combat as well and start fighting alongside you. Imagine in your head that you're about to do a slash with your weapon as the main character on an enemy, you can then press the appropriate keybind to in mid-combat switch over to another companion and take control of them as the toher characters continue to fight. Each character will have unique abilities that you can time and form some sick combos. I have no idea how hard this will be to create because on paper it seems easy but in my head the cool way I want to incorporate this feature/system may be a bit complicated but we shall see!
Establish more of the story (Throughout all of devlopment)
So far I know I've got the main character, 7 other main playable characters, 8 enemies, I know I'm leaning into eating hopes and dreams and fears and nightmares. Epitome is a dream-like toon world with crazy proportions and equally crazy characters to go with it so I'll definitely need to do something unique and memorable. I am HEAVILY inspired by the playstation 2/ original xbox era so I definitely want to capture that classic ps2 game story and everything.
Fill in the world and levels
(1-3 months)
I have recently just finished my heightmap and got my terrain roughly how I want. Once I have all the desirred buildings and other building assets done I will need to go through and fill in the world with all of the different stuff that I think will make the open world fun to play arorund in. I want a lot of verticality because the world is going tto be wild looking terrain wise. I also want to do a day and night cycle so we'll see where that goes as well!
Polish the game
(Be done by the year goal I've given myself or when I'm ready)
After I have evvvvvvvvverything done I'm talking chararcters, systems, combat, animations, vfx, sfx, interfaces, the world, quest system, quests, literally everything done I will then spend whatever remaining time if I have any or whatever I decide until I feel in my bones that the game is ready. I will know it's ready when I play it and it feels like playing a modern ps2 game. If you know you know