Hey, guests of the Fleapit!
What a month, huh? We’re incredibly excited to share a sneak peek behind the gates of Fleapit, and seeing your genuine excitement and passion for our game filled us with even more determination to make the best rhythm--slash-dungeon crawler-slash-date sim ever!
That being said, there’s no time to waste basking in the afterglow for us. There’s still much to do based on both our original development plans and your demo feedback, so let’s get right into it!
WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE DEMO
Honestly, not much. We’ve worked up some quick bug fixes and we just added the Russian VO, but we’re now focusing on the Next Big Thing and, truthfully, we just don’t have the resources to also keep polishing this little demo further and further.
We want to take a moment to restate how invaluable , and precious your feedback has been, and how incredibly thankful we are. We’re also extra excited to share that all that feedback will be implemented in…
ANOTHER NEW FLEAPIT DEMO..?!
Yep, you heard it right! I
And here’s what we’ve got in store for this next demo so far:
- Meta-progression — more fleshed out roguelite elements, traders, perks, skills, meta-currency, and all that jazz
- 5 dates with branching dialogue set in different locations
- The complete first 2 circles of Hell but this time bolder, bigger and more fun!
- Various mini-games including mixology, bowling, and more
But that’s not all!
Thanks to all the amazing feedback we got from this first demo, we’ll be able to add some of your suggestions in as well to hopefully make this a somewhat complete experience that we’ll proceed with moving forward!
(pssst, this is also the part where we remind you that if you have any feedback you’d like to share with us, you can do it via this handy google form and we’ll take it into consideration, thanks in advance! <3)
We can’t promise a hard date for this next big demo thingy yet, but we are working like Hell and are hopeful it won’t take nearly as long as this last one!
And now, since we mentioned more fleshed out roguelite elements, allow us to introduce…
THE SHOPKEEPER
It wouldn’t really be a roguelite if you can’t buy any items from a suspicious-looking merchant deep in a dungeon somewhere, would it? And since this is one of the latest characters we designed for Fleapit, we decided to share how he came to life from earlier concepts to the complete sprites.
The many, many iterations of the future Shopkeeper we had a first
It all begins with an idea. We decided that our Shopkeeper should be a powerful, intimidating, and mostly stationary figure early on, but it took a lot of fine tuning with details to settle on like ‘should this even be a living creature’ or ‘what the insides of his coat should look like’.
And after a lot of consideration and heated debates (which included pointing at the Fleapit lore document quite a bit) we landed on this guy:
What are ya buyin’?
Okay, so now we have a dialogue sprite for the Shopkeeper, but the work doesn’t end here. In fact, now we’re getting to the interesting part — how do we make this fellow look good in pixel art?
A lot of you were curious about our pixel art process, so we’ll let you on a little secret: the concept art for chibi-pixel versions of characters is also being done by our lead artist Mr. Psina. And here’s what the Shopkeeper looked like - chibified:
Once we settled on this design, our beloved pixel artist Todo takes over, works his own personal magic, it all comes together!
Bear witness for the Shopkeeper has come to life at last!
We can’t wait for you to meet him in person! Trust us, he’s a lovely individual, even if he’s stingy as all hell. Anyways, moving on!
PERK ARTS POGCHAMP PERK ARTS
In today’s edition of ‘Perks teasers’ we have a couple of those that we internally affectionately call ‘Andy gets absolutely decimated’ and both of these, as you’ve probably guessed, have something to do with Newbie losing HP.
While we don’t intend a ‘get hurt a lot’ playstyle to be viable, these might be helpful for those players who are new to the rhythm dungeon crawling and have occasional troubles with getting down the specific patterns and stuff. And you’ll see these, you guessed it, in the Next Steam Demo.
FLEAPIT’S QUICK TRIVIA BIT: REAPERS
Reapers reap (duh) and transport the shells of souls between the four worlds:
World of the Living -> Inferno -> Heaven -> Ministry of Death.
All Reapers were once people who indirectly worked with death: undertakers, pathologists, death priests, etc. Wonder what made Fasaria become one.
And that brings us to the end of our devlog! Thank you for stopping by, and see you in the next Fleapit Direct (as always, available one week earlier for our Patreon supporters, hit us up on Patreon to learn more: http://patreon.com/FinchBird)
Until then, don’t forget to follow us on the Former Bird Site and join the Freaked Fleapit Discord server to stay up to date on all the latest news and other degenerate antics!
See ya next month~
Finch Bird Team over and out!