New Character Reveals!
We've been showing off some new characters on our tumblr, and we've already revealed two! make sure to check out our tumblr to see the remaining reveals as well all the fun stuff Alexia has been posting there!
Meet Vivian!
Vivian comes from a dystopian, cyberpunk future where the evil corporation AQUILLA has the world by its throat. Along with her fellow agents of the resistance, she spends her nights battling against the forces of greed, led by the enigmatic Jupiter. But how did she find her way into the Spirit World?
Meet Carlos!
Carlos is a struggling photographer trying to regain some semblance of a career after his big exhibition was a huge flop. He's still bitter about this, but keeping busy with his work at Sakurafest, an anime convention that's returning to Nambo Quay.
Our Backer Beta is coming soon!
I'm happy to announce that we'll be running our beta on March 20th, which is in a little over two weeks! The beta will probably run for a couple weeks and then we will take it offline to focus on implementing feedback for early access over the month of April. If you've backed us at the ($30) Weekend Trip tier or higher, or purchased a beta add-on, you should have gotten a separate email with more details on participating in the beta!
Early Access Build Progress!
Since the start of this year, we've been working on bosses and also getting a beta build ready! Since then we've spent most of the past two months improving on the minimum viable version of our beta build. We've added the first pass for our biome 3 boss, which is going to be the finale of our initial early access content (if you watch the above gif, you might even spot our new character Vivian showing up to help you during the fight)
Over the next two weeks I'm focusing on getting more gameplay variety in for us to get feedback on! More enemies, abilities, rooms, etc!
We've also been adding art to our biome 3 hub! The main things we still want to get done between now and our beta is going to be adding more variety to the spirit world sections, making sure all three hubs are explorable and have some narrative events implemented, and making sure adding more ancestral gifts to allow for more varied builds! During and after the beta, we are going to have another month or so to address feedback and figure out if there are any additional features we want to have ready for the early access launch, and what we feel should wait until our first few content updates! We'll be sharing an update roadmap with everyone once we've got a sense of what we want to prioritize! My current hunch is that more replayability for folks who beat all three biomes will be something we need to add soon but we'll take a look at what the data is actually telling us!
The goal will be to have enough content for folks to have a good week of fun with what's there already, and get everyone excited enough to come back when we drop updates during early access! This means three distinct biomes, with enemies, bosses, and story events related to all three + enough systems to try out different builds for each run! You'll have three explorable hub areas, the first one should feel complete and the remaining two we will be bringing to completion with shops and interior areas while we are in early access
What happens after our Early Access Launch?
Once we have our early access launch (Which is on May 9th) we'll be looking to increase the scope and polish to make the game something you can have a month or more of fun with! We'll be adding more enemies, shops and room variety to existing biomes. We'll add systems and content that make the game more varied and replayable, more accessibility settings, and we're going to shoot for two big content pushes with two more biomes! In order for us to not go broke doing this, we really need to make sure our launch in May goes well first, so if folks want to help out with that here is one way you can do so!
Are you planning on reviewing Midautumn when it comes out?
One of the best things that people can do to help us have a successful launch is write us a review during that first week of early access with your honest impressions! Reaching a certain threshold of reviews is very crucial to having the game actually sell so I'm always happy to encourage reviews, whether they're positive or critical! I'll be posting some reminders as we get closer and closer to launch so keep an eye out for that!
That's going to be it for this update folks! We'll have another update for you after beta is completed with our post beta thoughts and plans!