I’m proud to announce that “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth,” my hand-drawn 3D indie game, is on track in development, and is roughly 85% complete!

… which I can say because I am reducing the size of the game.

Long ago (I think a couple months back), I tweeted a message suggesting that “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” would have 72 levels, divided into 8 worlds with 9 levels each. This was an arbitrary number of worlds, loosely inspired by old Mario games, and the number of total levels seemed appropriate given how simple most of the levels were. But now, I’ve firmly decided to go down to 63 levels, with 7 “worlds” instead of 8.

Why? Time. Well… that’s a poor and lazy excuse. A better reason is that in the original 8 sections, the 6th and 7th sections were nearly identical in purpose: it didn’t advance the story any, and extended the game artificially by throwing in several difficult levels. The 6th was the only section where the final level wasn’t comprised of an important cutscene/dialogue sequence. It felt off. It felt unnecessary. And a couple of those more difficult levels could easily find themselves in the final section, now the only major part of the game not yet completed.

Frankly, I don’t think most people cared that much about the amount of levels. And on more important matters…

I’ve finally gotten some fantastic voice acting and music down and finalized for “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth.” Recording and payment complete, it really does wonders to help make the game stand out. More on them can be found at http://drew.fromdustscratch.com . You can also see a trailer showing it off here:

Fun fact: this trailer is longer than the “teaser trailer” from months ago…

Admittedly, game development is starting to get expensive, but it was totally worth it. And this is shaping up to be a very important month…