Spring Round-Up!
Welcome to the February, March and April round-up! I’ve decided to slow down the amount of blog posts as part of me redirecting my energies towards more regular social media updates, rather than sticking to a weekly digest format. If you’d like to receive these updates more frequently, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or join our Discord community!
As we approach the end of the game’s development, I’ve been giving some thought to promotional material for the game. I’ve come up with a few drafts for posters that showcase the beautiful art we have. Most important is the trailer — I’ve drafted two scripts for two trailers that I intend to put on the game’s store page, as I reckon it’s the first thing gamers will look at if they’re considering buying the game. I’m very happy with the scripts the writer and I have put together, but I’m a little concerned about finding voice actors to cover the wide range of characters who feature. If anyone (preferably British) is interested, please let me know!
The portrait artist has been doing a fantastic job on the commissioned characters. Above we have all the different incarnations of Ann, and all of them needed a broad variety of emotions to display. Each of the characters in the game has their first portrait ready, and now we’re going back through them one by one and fleshing out their whole emotional range (as determined by the script). They should be ready in the next 6 weeks or so.
A few new minigames have been added to the mix. The psychic minigame allows you to access your mind-reading powers on a particular set of characters, rather than just hearing gobbledygook. The idea is to move the words up and down to form a set of sentences that make sense. Then it’s a matter of guessing who might be thinking those thoughts, and assigning that character to that thought. Get them all right, and you unlock the power to overhear their inner thoughts! Above is the hardest one in-game — the other 7 are somewhat easier.
The petty criminal ending, too, has a minigame — lockpicking seemed like a great fit for one. Although this game has already been through 4 different iterations, I wasn’t happy with them. One rendition was a take on Jotto. Finally, I settled on a game where you have to slide the tumblers up and down until the green bar forms a word from left to right. Any guesses on this door’s solution?
A lot of the work has gone into animating small cutscenes within pieces of dialogue. I’m not much of an artist myself, but using the base sprites I’ve been given it’s not been too hard to add animations to them. Be it swimming, angry cats, sliding buckets, throwing luggage in a river, or being chased by a reanimated pumpkin, the animations add a lot of charm to the game. Most of these little parts of the game have been finished now, and they do add a lot to the game — even though I’m personally not much of a stickler for graphics.
The game loop is almost finished, with 7.5 endings completed. I finally implemented the ladder feature into the game and realised a huge flaw in the logic — you can jump straight into the ball from the very first ending! So some changes are going to have to be made, then the 8th ending will be ready. I have some plans for the 9th ending (where the anachronisms go crazy!) but need to commit them to the script once I feel confident that the puzzle isn’t too contrived. Playtesting shall tell.
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