Devblog #113

Hey Wizards!
Shady Character One here!

Last week Shady Two and I decided to spend a little time focusing on the gaps that we still have in the game. Of which we have a lot, to be fair. Our approach of going both forward and sideways in development does allow us to keep both old players engaged and slowly polish the early game to make it more appealing to new players. But as time went on, it became clear that we do need to figure out at least the basics of the early game before we can really move forward.

Right now, as I see it, we have several main points of interest:

1. Backgrounds. This one is the problem that has been dragging on from the very first months of development. But sadly, this is the issue that is both expansive by itself and demands a lot of time on each background individually.

2. Inventory items. Even though we did add most of the items into the game, some of them are still missing, and the open slots stick out like a sore thumb.

3. The Trial of Mind. The first major event in the game has basically no visual component at the moment. Even the Trial of Might has better artworks than the first Trial.

4. Sound design. This one is a major headache for me still. But I hope that the rudimentary sound design that we have added is doing its job for now.

We decided to focus on the second and third issues for a bit. The inventory is almost done - it only needs three more items in there and this will be something that we can put into the “Completed” pile. Which I hope would be a huge boost for the morale.

The Trial of Mind is a much more serious undertaking. But hopefully it will bring a lot of bang for its buck. Funny thing is, when I gave Shady Two the descriptions for the “doors” in the Trial, I thought that they would be enough to give her the idea of what needs to be drawn. But I did that without looking at them for more than a year now. It turns out I was much more laconic in my writing back then. No wonder it took me relatively little time to finish writing it. So I had to sit down and come up with more descriptions and rough sketches for Shady Two to work with. I am still not sure if we will be able to finish all of the doors this month, but the progress is obvious, and sometimes you do need to clearly see that you are moving towards a goal.

Can you guess which of these "doors" is which?

Not all of the designs are finalized yet, and even the finalized ones are not completely finished yet, but that’s expected when you have 19+ different passages to design. Either way, it was pretty fun looking back at the part of the game that I haven’t touched for a while. I do hope that this addition will really prop up the early game for new players. And maybe it will even be “complete” enough to finally put up an actual Steam demo.

I guess I’ll have to think about it when we are closer to the finish line. For now,

Shady Character One, out!