Moving Right Along
Hello and welcome to another development blog update! A lot has happened with REM Cycles in the last month, so let’s take a look at what’s going on right now in each department.
Welcome to Club Succulent!
Design and Programming
For programming, this past month has been all about implementation. Two of our planned 6 bosses are now fully functional in-game and work as intended, which is great! (Balancing will come later…) We’re also working on the third area, known right now as the Lavalands. We’ve designed all level enemies and the boss, which will be added in later. Finally, several cutscenes have been added that make space for dialogue and story beats before and after boss battles.
Outside of enemies and levels, many of the game’s conversations between playable characters are now viewable in-game. We have them listed on the map selection screen for now, but we’re going to make a better way to access them later on. All of the playable characters and two NPCs have emotion portraits that match up with their dialogue, which we’re hoping will make conversations feel more immersive.
We now have 9 characters designed out of 10, and we’re hoping to have the last one figured out in the next month of so. We’re only including 5 with our publisher demo, but the others are coming along nicely and should be a real force in future builds.
Speaking of the publisher demo, we haven’t been able to get everything ready quite as quickly as we wanted to, so we’re still working on compiling our demo and writing our pitch. We’re not discouraged, though—we know these things take time, and slow and steady wins the race. We’ll send it off when we’re proud of what we have!
A very early version of the first conversation between playable characters Aiza and Faith. In the future, there will be portraits with different emotions (which have been tagged and are being added to the game now), backgrounds featuring the characters in question, and unique music. There will be a total of three scenes for each pair of characters. This text has been heavily edited and changed since this was taken, so don’t worry about spoilers!
Art and UI
We’ve had a ton of amazing art made by the talented Sarah Boeving over the past month! All 9 of our planned 10 playable characters have sprites, animations, and several different emotion portraits for conversations. We also have a full set of enemies and bosses for 4 out of 6 areas.
One of our favorite things to do over the past few weeks has been making small animations and images for Indie Dev Hour and Pixel Dailies on Twitter! These images help us show off what we’ve been working on and gain an audience on social media. We’ve loved the positive comments so far, and we’re looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks of bigger chunks of the game.
One of our Indie Dev Hour gifs! This is the hydra, a Lavalands creature that must stay in magma ponds but can fire projectiles at long range.
Music and Sound Effects
We’ve had so much fun listening to the music that Felix Arifin has made for us so far! We have themes for the Lavalands and the Pridelands, as well as one for boss fights, one for cutscenes, and one for support conversations with a more somber tone. (Seriously, the Lavalands music is so good that I’ve been listening to it while writing. It makes me groove!) In the future, we’re looking into sound effects for enemy attacks and another theme for support conversations of a different tone. Check out the theme for our first area, the Cloudlands, below!
Writing
Character conversations as far as the eye can see! The last several weeks have produced a lot of new writing for us, including most of the conversations for character #9 (which I’ll be finishing up next week) and an absolute boatload of in-character social media posts. (If you’re curious how our characters would tweet, you can find those on Twitter!) We also spent the better part of a week editing and tagging finished conversations with matching portraits, which means that character emotions will match up with the text. It was a bit of a guessing game at first as not all of the portraits were complete when we started tagging, but they’re all finished now and we’re really looking forward to seeing them in action.
As a thanks for reading this far, here’s a sneak peak at a character who’s not in the demo yet!