Hello everyone,
I apologize for not publishing a development update sooner, but if you follow me on Twitter, you likely saw that I've been quite active. There is lots to talk about and it's all good news! So, let's get into it.
New UI
The game now has a new UI! I got great feedback here and on social media about pixel-art UI vs. an HD UI. Obviously, each one has it's advantages and disadvantages. But I think I can summarize it by only listing advantages:
- Pixel-art UI advantages: Aesthetic perfectly matches the in-game graphics
- HD UI advantages: More detailed UI (which means it can be smaller and leave more in-game graphics visible), more contrast between the UI and in-game graphics, better for legible text, easier implementation for localization and different characters/alphabets, more accessible all-around.
So, thinking about just advantages, HD UI wins out! Don't get me wrong, I love... LOVE... the pixel-art UI. But I think the advantages listed above for the HD UI make it a no-brainer. Take a look at what the new HD UI looks like:
New Key Art
Key Art is so important in any game. It's meant to show any potential player a preview of the story, what genre the game likely is, and the overall tone of the game. That said, I have changed the key art to this:
What do you think? It was certainly fun to draw and I like the pulp-comic book type aesthetic.
Localization
I was always planning on localizing TAP into several languages. Of course, I cannot personally localize TAP to every language. However, I do speak Spanish and Haitian Creole, in addition to English. While I'm interested in localizing the game into Haitian Creole towards the end of development (maybe the first Haitian Creole game ever?), at the moment, I wanted to set up the system of localization by starting with localizing the demo into Spanish.
That means that the Steam demo is currently localized into Spanish! Si hablas español, actualiza el juego y déjame saber qué piensas. Me interesa saber si cometí algunos errores en la traducciȯn. ¡Gracias!
The final game will likely be available in the following languages:
- English
- Spanish
- Italian
- French
- German
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Chinese Simplified
- Chinese Traditional
Additional Progress
Performance Improvements
While I was completing the bulk of artwork for acts 1-3, I noticed that the farther you play, the slower the game was getting in terms of frame-rate and performance. I checked out some things and I realized that I was caching the MoveDirection menus incorrectly. They were piling up and getting loaded into each scenes. That's potentially hundreds of menus in every scene. Yikes!
This led to an overhaul of how the MoveDirections work in-engine. While the player won't notice any difference, this is a huge change and it took two full weeks to fix. Unfortunately though, it means that previous demo saves won't work when you update the demo.
Act 2 nearly completed
I like to build my games in stages. You may remember that I did a rough draft of the entire game using sketch art-work. This is still the case for Acts 4 and 5. But Acts 1-3 are completely navigable with completed artwork.
Now, before I go and finish the artwork for Acts 4 and 5, I'm taking a month to completely finish Act 2. This was requested by my publisher, Snapbreak, so that we can send out an expanded demo (Acts 1 and 2) to influencers and streamers, as well as for a Brazilian festival that will showcase the game.
This means that I am knee deep in puzzles and polish. I'm almost done and it's been super fun. Check out a teaser/preview for Act 2:
That's it! That's all the progress I have made so far. I've been super busy with work, my family, and other responsibilities, but I love working on The Abandoned Planet. I'm working hard at making it an amazing game that people will enjoy and want to share will others.
Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!
Jeremy Fryc
dexterstardust.com