Hey friends! I've been busy working away at the demo this month, and basically got the whole thing finished up >:D
All that remains is to do some more QA and bug hunting, so let's get into what I've been doing.
A Whole New World
So like I mentioned in the last devlog the main thing now was to actually design the whole demo area - not exactly a quick job! To try and make a start I went back to the paper sketches I did originally of the islands, then simplified them and started planning out what items went where and what paths the gates led to.
Each gate takes you to the dream world, for now there's no gates that take you back into a seperate waking area so for the demo at least it was a bit simpler as the gates would just take you to a smaller area to explore and then come back to the waking world - however there were still a few specific 'treasures' I wanted to hide, along with some lore notes to discover if you explore.
One thing I ended up doing too is deciding that the demo area will be different to the full-game starting area - I don't have the time right now to plan the whole world properly, and I spent a lot of time worrying how the demo area would fit in with stuff I hadn't even designed yet. By saying, okay actually this will just be a special demo area, loosely based on what the full game will have, meant I could take some pressure off and experiment.
It'll mean that demo worlds can't be used for the full-game but honestly im okay with that, APICO did the same - I'll probably just do some starting items/unlocks for players that played the demo as a reward if they want it.
Once I had the world sketched out I then, moved things over to tiled, sketching out the large sections of water + land first and then slowly going in and adding all the objects.
I think it took about 3 days of solid work to get the final demo world in a way that worked, there were some bits that I had to stop, go draw some scenery, and then come back to Tiled - but this let me setup some nicer little areas and rooms to explore, with plenty of secrets/hints hidden in the environment.
The game is set in a research pond, so I wanted there to be plenty of notes + journals and information left lying about, which made it super fun to fill out each of the rooms and areas and actually think about what they were/are used for, as well as what hints I could show rather than tell.
Once I finished designing the world in Tiled I didn't actually have to do much coding to get it working - there were a couple of 'locked' things that you need keys to open, but Tiled let's you set properties on any of the objects so I just added something to handle that and the rest just loaded in!
Plus now I had the finished world done I could draw the map! For Mudborne I wanted to do things a little bit different yet again, and this time not have a pixel perfect map - instead something a bit more drawn out, with some notes jotted over it as clues.
This means I can have a bit more artistic license with the map and the proportions, to emphasis certain areas over others - as well as have multiple different maps in the full-game that you have to find to unlock (plus the dream equivilents!)
Playtesting
With the world fully designed, now it was time to just... play the game a shit-tonne. I also needed to do the SFX, which I always enjoy, but I also needed to do the music - sadly for Mudborne's full-game I haven't got Mothense around, so this time I took a stab at the music myself!
If it ends up sucking ass I can always get a composer for the full-game, but I've also always wanted to try doing some myself so seemed like a good opportunity to try it.
So while playtesting I'd jot down any SFX needed and add them as I went, along with some nice ambience tracks for day/night. Then after playtesting each day I tried to attempt making a little bit of music, even if it was just staring at the piano for a few hours - eventually I came up with a couple of tracks that I felt fit in with the general atmosphere of the game (although to call it full music would be a bit generous, muzak might be a better term haha!)
While playtesting I also tweaked the quests a bit, just to make sure everything was clear enough - while still leaving a few bits for players to discover themselves. I also got my friend Ash to help - she's done the QA for APICO and Snacktorio, and she's very good at breaking my games now too :')
For the most part there wasn't too many major changes to the gameplay - a bunch of QoL stuff for sure but nothing that deviated from the original plan that much. One thing I tweaked was preventing the natural mushroom spores blooming as it was really easy to just gather them and never make your own mushroom farms.
Instead I made spores still form naturally, and my using the magnifying glass on them it'd store where you saw them so you could easily replicate that later with your cultivators - so they act more like clues of where you can cultivate rather than being easy farms.
Another change was the later gates need a couple generations, which introduces the concept of 'ancestry' to the demo. I didn't want to have this super hand-held to the player, it's something I think is very visual that you learn as you go - however I still wanted something to make it easier.
Luckily I'd left some space in one of the rooms to turn it into an 'ancestry research' place - with a new machine that allows you to view any frogs last 7 generations (shown below on the right), along with a lore note on how the system works.
I also added it so you could use the magnifying glass on gates to store their unlock requirements - this was you can easily revisit them in the book without walking all the way back to try and remember what you needed.
In the demo there is only 1 and 2gen gates, but later on you'll find ones all the way up to 7gen, which would be extremely hard to just remember or even write down yourself on paper.
With that all done it just left a lot of testing and bug hunting/fixing - something I'm still doing now as it's easy to overlook stuff when there's only a couple of you playtesting!
Finishing Touches
With the new demo ready outside of more testing, I then spent a bunch of time cleaning up the old steam page, getting some new screenshots and trying to explain the game and show off the gameplay a bit better than what the original gamejam text did - esp. showing the 'dream' world.
I'd also been in talks with a publisher for a lot of this year about Mudborne - sadly I never heard anything back in the end and they ghosted me last minute, which was unfortunate as I'd met up with them a few times so felt like it was pretty close to happening and was relying on them for a big push around the new demo.
With that no longer happening I also spent this month frantically getting in contact with all sorts of people, first to try and decide the best thing to do in the limited time I had, and then find people who actually had the time to do something last minute without breaking the bank - I was extremely fortunate to ended up contacting someone who managed to turn things around very last minute, I can't say anything just yet but keep an eye out for more news!
So now begins the last little stretch - lots more playtesting and QA, some performance tests and optimisation, and just generally trying to make sure this new demo really shows off what the game is going to be about.
Testing it with some more people helped me feel a bit more confident about it all - I think because so much is done differently from APICO I started to second guess myself but now everythings finished off and I can play it end to end I'm really happy with where it's ended up.
I can't wait to let you all get your slimy green hands on it, and, by the time you read the next devlog - you already would have :D
~ Ell