Hello everyone,
It's been a while since we talked to you, so here we are !
First of all, we will be part of the October Steam Next Fest !
During this event, you will be able to try the game in a short demo with a friend for free. This demo will showcase some basic levels that will be rather easy compared to the rest of the game. They will introduce you to the game and all of the core mechanics. We currently aim at a 60-90min demo with 24 levels.
We are also discussing with some people to make an introduction stream at the start of the event to present the game and answer some questions you might have. We will have some news about this later as we come closer to the fest.
Finally, we will release a small trailer that will introduce newcomers to the game's concept and main mechanics.
That's all for the steam fest. We will now spend some time explaining what's next for Palallel and what's going on.
Current Focus :
Devblogs
When we decided to participate in the steam next fest, we made the choice of delaying the devblogs to have more time to spend on the game's development. Although we loved to discuss the issues we encountered and the design choices we've made, we won't don't plan to make any devblog in the near future. This is a really time-consuming process in research, illustration, and writing and with the demo coming in October, we had some priorities that came first. That doesn't mean we won't make anymore devblogs, but it's in a frozen state as we work on polishing and finishing the demo.
Demo
The Steam October Next Fest was a target for us for a long time. We've missed the July Fest because the game wasn't ready but we knew that a new one was coming. We've been preparing for this new fest for some time now, some of you may even have participated in a playtest we've made a couple of weeks ago (thanks a lot !). This playtest was incredibly useful for us, it allowed us to fix a lot of issues and identify key problems about some of our base mechanics. We've fixed almost every one of these issues and even though some remains, we are confident in the current demo's state.
What we're working on
Of course, we are still polishing the demo as we come closer to the fest. Some issues are hard to track but we are doing our best to finish the demo. We changed our server hosting service to gain stability and to have a bit more margin for the number of concurrent users. Thanks to the design choices we've made at the start of the project, Palallel is a game that requires almost nothing in terms of resources (both networking and client-wise). This topic is probably one of the most important topics we would like to talk about in a devblog, but as I said earlier, it's too complicated right now.
We are also preparing for the future. We are adding some new mechanics that won't be in the demo and we're constantly adding levels to the game. Some of these mechanics will be shown in the trailer we will release with the steam fest.
What's coming next :
The game has a new structure with worlds (we will go more deeply into this later). We won't spoil anything about this right now as we are currently designing these worlds but expect some news after the fest.
Palallel will feature special levels (called 'Mid' and 'End') that will have a unique mechanic associated to them. With each world comes one mid-level and one end level (names are WIP). I'll let you discover these when the demo released in October.
We also plan to add bonus levels that didn't make it in the current world you're playing. These levels won't be accessible at first, you will need to unlock them by paying attention to the world (rather mysterious ːshadeknightː). See this as a "cut content" that we've add to the game for those who want more challenge.
We have some more work to do on UI, sounds, and more and we're planning to add controller support as well as some settings in the main menu. All of this will come in the future sooner or later.
The end :
Even though this post is incredibly long, we still have one more surprise for you : the friend's pass.
There will be two versions of Palallel. The complete version will allow players to host & join a game while a free version will be available that will allow players to join anybody (but can't host).
This will allow players to enjoy Palallel at low costs.
Thank you for following us, we hope this answered some of your questions. We'll see you very soon during the fest !