Play Pretend Release Date

26 Oct 2023Developer post

We did Next Fest...So What's Next?

Many of you will know we took part in the Steam Next Fest at the start of this month. It was an exciting experience and hopefully, a few of you are reading this having discovered us during the event! Next Fest wrap-up Next Fest was an excellent opportunity for us to nail down a f

Many of you will know we took part in the Steam Next Fest at the start of this month. It was an exciting experience and hopefully, a few of you are reading this having discovered us during the event!

Next Fest wrap-up

Next Fest was an excellent opportunity for us to nail down a full vertical slice experience for you all to play through since we last did way, way..way back last year at EGX. Since EGX we made many, many...many changes and it really shows.

The feedback we got from you all on the lead up to, and during Next Fest was both very helpful and super motivational, you all seemed to enjoy our demo with some of you racking up multiple hours in a demo only lasting 20 minutes at a time. And we really appreciate it.

Next up

We are now at a point where we can begin to really fully produce more front-facing content for you all, more concept art, more environment, more worlds and more characters.

Since Next Fest we have spent some time carefully considering what is still missing from our prototype and where to really focus our efforts next, as such, we spent a while considering our GDD and working through some of the greater meta systems such as the permanent progression and additional player agency that Play Pretend is so dearly missing.

The dragon in the room

One of our main focuses next will be finalising the fantasy world in its entirety and that means Agatha will return. Agatha has always been a favourite of mine however we have never been fully happy with how she plays, as such we took her from the demo so we could take some time to really think about how to make her as threatening as possible, all whilst playing up her dragon-like charm as best we can and next month we will go through a full run down on what that is going to really look like. All I can say is she's going to have a little more bounce in her step moving forward and a few changes to how she fights.

Howdy partner

Moving on we also are hoping to be able to get some information on Jess's western steampunk world, the enemies within and our second playable character, someone you'll have become familiar with throughout the demo, Gracie. Keep an eye out for our rundown of those two things to come!

A Note from me

I just want to round this update out with a little note from myself to thank you all for sticking with us this far, this project has meant a lot to all of us and we cannot believe how lucky we are to have come this far. I say it a lot but we really are so excited to keep up these updates and producing more and more for this game. Harry, Raj and the others have been really hard at work to finalise some of the design aspects we really needed and I am absolutely sure all of you will love what we've got in store.

Once again, drop us a follow on Twitter, tell everyone you know to wishlist Play Pretend and jump onto our Discord and drop us a message. See you all there and take care! - B

Original post

27 Sep 2023Developer post

OCTOBER NEXT FEST - YOU CAN PLAY PRETEND!

Some of you may have noticed our Steam page recently got a massive overhaul, all in preparation for our demo going live TODAY! We have been haaard at work getting things together following our playtest earlier this month (on a side note if you want to get involved with playtests

26 Sep 2023Developer post

Devlog #12 What's on the Menu

We're back with some more updates to share, this time as we are preparing for Steam Next Fest in a few weeks, we have been tweaking and messing around with every aspect of Play Pretend to make it the best it can be. This months update will be covering our new UI and menu changes

26 Sep 2023Developer post

Devlog #11 - Making Our Fantasy a Reality

Hello again! Long time no see, sorry about that! We've been quiet this month getting all ready to show off our fantasy world in all its entirety. This is a long ol' post so strap in! Way back when development started for Play Pretend, we knew we wanted various imaginary worlds th

Hello again! Long time no see, sorry about that!

We've been quiet this month getting all ready to show off our fantasy world in all its entirety. This is a long ol' post so strap in!

Way back when development started for Play Pretend, we knew we wanted various imaginary worlds themed after childhood dreams and fantasies. As such, we just had to have a medieval fantasy world featuring dragons, knights, and a princess. We set out to develop it as our first world and so it's been through many iterations to get to where we are now.

EGX:
Those of you who we met last year at EGX may remember our fantasy world as a flat, green landscape. While we were happy with how it was looking then, we knew we could do so much better.

Recolour:

The first thing we knew we wanted to address was the colour scheme. I've mentioned this before in a previous post, but as a reminder, here's a peek at how far the fantasy environment has come:

THEN:

NOW:

Retheme:

As part of the recolour, we shifted theming a little too, when we first set out with the fantasy world we were fully set on a very typical fantasy princess look. While fleshing out some of the other worlds, however, we decided to shift this to more of a fantasy/witch mix which really contributed to how we themed our props and final colours. Spooky?

Them's fightin' words

Of course, our worlds would be pointless if they weren't full of a wide range of enemies. We've been working really hard to get a full set of enemies in along with Agatha in all her glory. In celebration of the enemies being completed, here's a rapid rundown of some of the fantasy roster:

Froggie + Toad Bombers - Long-range attackers who will try their best to hit you with their frog spawn bubbles.

Nekomancers - Slippery cats who use their magic to teleport away when targeted.

Empty knights - Hulking suits of armour that chase you down. Careful when you hit their helmet off, it'll only make them quicker

(Almost) breezing through

All throughout the development of the fantasy world, we've faced an large number of challenges, most of which are less related to the world itself and more about how we build worlds in the first place. These varied from little things like how to mark areas inaccessible to the player, to big things like what should happen in terms of visibility when the player walks behind some of the environment. However, with most of these issues now out of the way, we are finally able to pick up the pace on world development, which means we're getting closer to being able to reveal that all-important release date!

If you want to hear more about how we solved these challenges and what they entailed, drop me a DM on Twitter and I'll do my best to answer any questions! (@dog_possum)

What's next?

As work on the fantasy world draws to a close, we are now gearing up for a public playtest (Steam Next Fest is coming up soon 👀!) If you haven't already, be sure to wishlist Play Pretend so you can get your hands on it as soon as our demo goes live! -> bit.ly/PlayPretendGame

Of course, we are also hard at work on the other worlds, playable characters, and our all-important Ideas that really put the rogue-lite into... well... the rogue-lite!

As always, keep in touch over on Twitter, wishlist the game on Steam, and join our community Discord to help us with early playtesting. We can't wait to see what you all think very soon! - B

Original post

19 May 2023Developer post

Devlog #10 - Our characters finally got a spine!

Hello again you wonderful people, today's devlog is ALL about animation. When we set out with our 2D/3D hybrid art style, animation was a concern for us. We initially settled on doing all animations by hand, relying on the amazing talent of Katie and Lauren, but this quickly bega

Hello again you wonderful people, today's devlog is ALL about animation. When we set out with our 2D/3D hybrid art style, animation was a concern for us. We initially settled on doing all animations by hand, relying on the amazing talent of Katie and Lauren, but this quickly began to show its flaws. Being a small team, having two team members working on hand animation whilst still requiring them to be producing concept art, UI and promotional work just wasn't sustainable. With our new favourite purchase, we solved this, and oh boy, what a difference it makes.

The old ways
Before I go into detail on how we do things now (if you know a thing or two about 2D animation, you'll have a pretty good idea of where this all is heading), let's talk about how we used to produce all our animations.

In the days of old, we'd spend a lot of time discussing animations before even getting a chance to see how they might look. Hand drawing each frame resulted in either limiting animation or taking forever to put an animation together (it took us months to get together a simple player animation base).

The best method we had was to put together a sketch and a skeleton of the animation, outlining how the character may move and how the overall animation may look, before then drawing over with a full sprite, drawing out each frame and then finally shading the animation.

Five drawings for just one walk cycle...

With a lot of sketches, flat passes and shaded passes, each animation would require being drawn upwards of 3 or 4 times just to get to a baseline that we could then feedback on and change as needed... It doesn't take much to realise that in a team as small as ours this is a lot of work. On top of this, whenever there were any changes needed (and there were a lot of changes often) we'd have to literally go back to the drawing board, redrawing troublesome frames over and over and sometimes redesigning entire animation sequences until we were happy with them.

Not so spineless
After a lot (and I mean a lot) of deliberation, we decided to invest in a new tool for our animators: Spine. Spine is a 2D animation software that utilises skeletal image deformation. This enables us to create entire animation sequences using only one or two hand-drawn sprites, allowing for quick iteration on animations as well as the ability to tweak small portions of an animation without requiring entire sections to be re-drawn from scratch.

It immediately saved us time.

Where before, a single animation could take up to 3 weeks to complete, our team are now able to output fully complete characters (with four or more animations) in the same time frame or less -- a massive time difference. Another added bonus was how much smoother we could have our animations look, as Spine interpolates the bones between frames.

The one downside of using Spine was that it made shading our characters a lot harder, as the angle of a character lit by the sun doesn't tend to change while it moves. This means that we'll have to look into lighting our sprites in engine, and perhaps adding a little more texture to them in future to bring back that element of depth.

Looking at the frog side by side you can clearly see a difference in detail and quality, and the new animations took around half the time!

OLD:

NEW:

Going forward, this will mean that we can make progress much faster, keeping you guys in the loop with bigger updates, more content, and above all get the game in your hands much sooner! Lastly, I just wanted to mention that our Steam page has had a little overhaul (with a re-edited trailer and everything) - so be sure to check it out and wishlist if you haven't already!

Can't wait to tell you all about the new world we've been putting together, see you all very soon! -B

Original post

05 May 2023Developer post

Devlog #9 - All the colours of the rainbow!

(If you're reading this on Steam and are confused why we are starting at #9, our previous dev logs can be found here ). Hello there! Ben here for my first update (Harry usually writes these but I've gone rogue) It's been a while I know, but I promise you, it's been worth the wait

(If you're reading this on Steam and are confused why we are starting at #9, our previous dev logs can be found here).

Hello there! Ben here for my first update (Harry usually writes these but I've gone rogue) It's been a while I know, but I promise you, it's been worth the wait! All of us at K-Scope have been working hard focusing on content; finalising colours, characters, and ideas, we are even closing in on a playable demo (but more on that in the future)

A fresh lick of paint

Our artists (myself included) have spent probably a few too many hours ~~arguing~~
debating over colour schemes, ultimately resulting in Lauren saving us all and putting together some concepts. You might notice the complete lack of the garish bright pink of the fantasy world...its for the better trust us.

Since putting these concepts together its become much clearer for myself and the others when it comes to designing both 3D and 2D elements for Play Pretend, allowing us to really amp up the quality and speed of the assets we create. Here's a lil' sneak peek at some of the enemies and the final look for the fantasy world, complete with a new colour palette and an all-new rework of our boss fight.

If you want to learn more about our enemies keep an eye on our Twitter - I'll be sharing some behind the scene glances at how we put them together and maybe even a couple tips on how to beat them when the time comes!

Not all about the looks

It's not just our artwork that's had a lot of love poured into it, we are nearing full completion of the core design of the entire project, with even a little allowance for expanding the project post-release if we are able to. What this means for you all is that we can begin to share more content that we can firmly say will be final and in the game we so badly want to put in your hands! I'll be sharing more about each world, character and playstyle soon, putting together a post dedicated to each character and the worlds their amazing imagination has put together for you all to play through.

We'll be seeing you soon

As we begin to produce more and more content and we have finally settled into a development pipeline we are able to manage our resources a little better, as such you'll all be hearing from myself and the others far more often, with regular development updates coming out..well...regularly. Along with more information over on our Twitter, and maybe even an event or two over on our Discord, if any of that is of interest to you be sure you keep in touch!

Much love and see you very soon for the next devlog update!
- B

Original post

Play Pretend

Updates & announcements

We did Next Fest...So What's Next?

Next Fest wrap-up

Next up

The dragon in the room

Howdy partner

A Note from me

OCTOBER NEXT FEST - YOU CAN PLAY PRETEND!

New Trailer

New Controls

New Map

New Content

NEW FUN!

Devlog #12 What's on the Menu

Devlog #11 - Making Our Fantasy a Reality

Hello again! Long time no see, sorry about that!

Recolour:

Retheme:

Them's fightin' words

(Almost) breezing through

What's next?

Devlog #10 - Our characters finally got a spine!

Devlog #9 - All the colours of the rainbow!

A fresh lick of paint

Not all about the looks

We'll be seeing you soon