Hello friends 💜,
Autumn's cometh, and it's time already for a new issue of Nova's Diary! And a special one too, because we recently passed our first(ish) anniversary of development; and as such, we wanted to celebrate it by answering some questions, mainly regarding the project itself and the long-due Kickstarter:
"OI, IT'S BEEN 3 MONTHS ALREADY! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
Well... Here! We've been hard at work (and still are!), fleshing out the game and adding content, while
simultaneously continuing the search for a publisher/fund/someone willing to help us through funding or
assistance. Alas, the search for now hasn't yielded great results for us, leading the way for alternative solutions such as Kickstarter.
"UH THAT'S GREAT, BUT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED TO IT?
We thought that announcing the Kickstarter opening during E3's Guerrilla Collective was the better
course of action (spoiler: it was). What we DIDN'T thought was how lenghty and tedious some legal preparations were. Just days before the opening we run into some difficulties that made really really hard for us for continue with our plan without messing up something later on, so we unanimously decided to hold back the opening until those issues had been fixed.
On the positive, as of recentl days we finally have our situation 100% clear and thanks to our legal team, we expect things to return to normal somewhere before the end of the year.
"SO, THE GAME'S STILL COMING TO KICKSTARTER RIGHT?"
That's right! As soon as those pesky difficulties are settled, we'll open up the Kickstarter campaign!
We'll probably have to rethink a couple of goals and reward tiers too, but most of the structure is already in place! But what if it fails?
Most likely we'll go sulk in the corner for a bit, and then we'll resume development as usual. As we repeatedly stated, our ABSOLUTE priority is to finish the game and deliver it to Steam in its best condition, although production time will inevitably be lenghtened and we'll have to cut content to make sure the game comes out.
"AND WHEN WILL THE GAME OFFICIALLY LAUNCH?"
Our final, stone-set deadline is Q2 2022.
Great, now that I have successfully submerged you with too many words, let's head over to the actual devlog...
"Obligatory cute cat pic to restore humanity"
DESIGN & STUFF
September had a whole lot of different tasks for us designer , as we focused on adding the finishing design touches on the previous Days, while also prepping scenes/mechanics for the last ones (we're close!). Work has gone into the implementation of our main quests into said Days, while also putting some thought in fixing/reworking some old structures/mechanics that we no longer use.
Also, we begun working on something special, that you guys will probably see very soon... 👀
The only thing we can show you as of now is this, have fun theorizing!
"So many secret in just one gif..."
2D ART & STUFF
September's packed of content from the artists too, starting things big with the finalization of the Art Clerk, a character we talked about in the past that will make his appearance from the third Day! You can say that his looks are rather...Unique, but stay sure that what he lacks in aesthetics he makes up with personality and charm /s. Another thing artists have been busy with was working with us designers in creating the second puzzle from prototypes, and the final result is very much like we first imagined it!
"You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like in 2089. Being handless."
3D ART & STUFF
You know 'em, you love 'em: trees once again! Huge progress has been made in the shader creation, so much that we even begun testing on other type of trees! This tests are not necessarily needed as we are pretty content with the current results, but who knows, maybe we'll find a way to make our trees even prettier and pleasing!
"These trees indeed spark joy"
"These do not spark much joy...Yet"
More work has gone into creating more and more different models for rooftops (finally we can officially solve the flat roof crisis). This was another much needed change, considering how some things are going to be different in the high tide in the future (spoilers!!), some variety would really serves us well.
(P.S. I apologize for the crappy quality of the images)
PROGRAMMING & STUFF
With programming, apart from the implementation of new quests and mechanics, we have the usual bunch of fixes and other stuff we are not really able to show you (unless you are a programmer yourself I dunno how exciting it'd be to watch hundreds of lines of code).
But on a side note they also created this gate. For now it really just serves one quest, but I'm positive that we'll manage to find many a more uses to it!
And that concludes our summary for September. We hope that the inital FAQs (can we even call it that?) satisfied your questions, otherwise PLEASE do let us know, through here on Steam or over any of our socials; we'll do our best to answer you.
See you in the next, spookiest month!