Hello, Dinofans!
It’s been a while since our last update, and we’re thrilled to share some major milestones, exciting progress, and a big announcement about Theropods! Let’s dive in.
We Have a Publisher!
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve partnered with Dionous Games as our publisher! You might know them for their work on Watch Over Christmas, and we couldn’t be happier to have their support.
When we started this journey, we funded Theropods through your amazing Kickstarter support and our personal savings. Thanks to Dionous, we can now work on the game full-time.
This means the project has clear milestones and (gasp!) a rough deadline in sight. While we’re not sharing the release date just yet (but it's most likely within 2025), this partnership brings us closer than ever to delivering the game we’ve dreamed of to all of you.
Cutscenes: Storytelling Without Words
Since our last update, we’ve storyboarded every single cutscene for the game and started bringing them to life. It’s been a challenging but fun process.
Cutscenes play a critical role in our game, especially because Theropods relies entirely on non-verbal storytelling. Without dialogue, we had to tackle practical problems like:
- How do the Spaceman and Amazon communicate if they don’t speak the same language?
- How can we ensure players understand what’s being communicated through visual, emotive language?
- How do we deliver necessary expositional information important to understanding the stakes of the story?
Despite these challenges, we believe the cutscenes have added empathy, heart, and depth to our characters. They elevate the story in ways we’re really proud of, and we can’t wait for you to experience them.
Take a peek at our creative process! Here are some snapshots of our rough storyboards, from notebook sketches to Photoshop compositions.
Playtesting & Refining
We’ve also started playtesting! We’ve been sending the game to a select group of testers, recording their playthroughs, and analysing their experiences. This has been invaluable for adjusting puzzle hints and fine-tuning the difficulty.
As game designers, we are terrible playtesters of our own games, since we already know the solution to the puzzles we pose. Therefore, when we playtest ourselves, we tend to go straight for the correct solution of the puzzle, go through the motions and when we solve it, think the job is done.
STORYTIME!
Years ago, I (Kostas) worked on a beat-em-up game called Armed Prophet.
I playtested the game myself like crazy and decided that at times, the game was too easy. As I breezed through enemies and bosses, I nudged our programmer to have 2 game difficulties, easy and hard. Reduce the life bar, give players healing packs sparingly, etc.
When the game was released, I watched people playing and, to my surprise, noticed the game was insanely difficult for them, even on easy mode. They kept dying constantly!
That’s when it hit me: of course I thought the game was easy, I spent tons of hours on it! I was an expert on my own game. Poor players just got their hands on it. Being challenging was one thing, being stupidly difficult was another. It may seem an obvious lesson to you reading this now, but for me, it clearly wasn’t until I saw it happening.
THE OLDER BROTHER
Tim Schafer, the legendary game dev behind Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, talks about helping players solve a puzzle, you as a developer need to have the role of an older brother:
Designers should provide players with responses if they attempt a non-working solution, not just reject their answer to a particular piece of the puzzle. They should provide hints when players fail and rewards when players get close to solving a puzzle. Schafer likened the game’s role to that of an older brother, saying “You’re getting there. Keep working on it.”
Here is further proof that Tim knows what he is talking about.
One issue we are tackling at the moment is player feedback and nudging them towards the correct solution. This means starting to think in hints. Your character can always say ‘no’ to when something isn’t working, but if all they say is ‘no’, it starts getting a little annoying and not helpful.
Therefore, we need to create a few helpful, feedback animations for the main character to perform, accompanied by some emotive voice acting.
When we playtested a puzzle in the game, we had a very particular issue where players kept missing an important vine they needed to click on. To their defence, that vine was not present from the start of the puzzle and when it appeared halfway through, it was during a complex animation scene where other stuff moved around on the screen
So what did we do? We followed Charles Cecil’s advice, another legendary game dev of Broken Sword fame. Mr Cecil spoke on ways of getting the players’ attention while making them feel like they made progress themselves, without anyone helping them.
“And I was kind of inspired by a game that really doesn’t inspire me at all: Candy Crush” … “The best thing about it,” Cecil says, is the “little sparkles” to look in a certain direction. “Yes! That’s the solution. But it was me that worked it out. I wasn’t told the solution, so we will also have little sparkles; just look in this direction.” He continues, “Hopefully, the player will know. ‘If I’m stuck, it is going to come along and help me’”
Pictured above: not exactly 'sparkles' but you get the idea. That blue donut thingy wiggles to catch your attention.
So we basically used our environment, and when the vine gets there, to draw your attention, a bright pink butterfly conveniently lands on the vine. Now, that draws your attention. If anything, you want to click on this butterfly, ending up noticing the important vine.
So we are going to coin the term ‘Critter Hints’(™) and use butterflies, lizard, flies and other little critters around the game to help you whenever needed.
Improved UI & New Assets
We’re constantly tweaking the user experience and creating assets to make the game as polished and intuitive as possible. With every iteration, the game feels more cohesive and engaging.
Polishing is a long way to go, but we squeeze in an asset or two when we can. Just look at this beautiful fire by Matt, along with pretty UI items.
Next Steps
Here’s what’s coming up for Theropods:
- Compiling all puzzles into their rough form using existing assets.
- Iterating between creating new assets and programming.
- Finalizing cutscene animations and assets for the last chapters.
SHOUTOUT TIME!
LOCOMOTIVE IS OUT!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1709880/Loco_Motive/
MYTHWRECKED: AMBROSIA ISLAND IS COMING OUT, DECEMBER THE 5TH!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2000210/Mythwrecked_Ambrosia_Island/
PRIMAL PLANET LOOKS FANTASTIC (not only does it have a ton of dinosaurs, but is also developed by the fantastic SeethingSwarm, our very first programmer on Theropods!)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2350270/Primal_Planet/
With Matt and Sarah juggling pixel art animation and programming, and Kostas focused on cutscene and animation assets, the team is working tirelessly to bring Theropods to life.
Thank you, as always, for your patience, support, and enthusiasm. We can’t wait to show you more soon.
Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments!
Kostas and Sarah
Theropods has been for around 7 years in development. And if we count the original game jam version from 2016, it’s really been 10. 
