Opening • Statement
Hello, hello, and hi, welcome to July, with yours truly, flower baasket! Here for the final devlog until the release of 0.4. What a ride it's been. This is the first devlog I've written quite some time in advance, as I'll be going away for about a week or so after this goes live. I won't be able to respond to messages, so I sure hope my community manager posts this when he's supposed to!
To start off with, our Discord server hosted its very first gamenight. I'm a little shy, so I didn't show up, but it had a very decent turnout rate when you consider the server is from a game that hasn't been updated in nearly nine months. Thank you to everyone that showed up, and thank you to my community manager Ufori who made it all possible.
I'll leave the mushy stuff for later, but I have been very hard at work this month. All those Products I was complaining about? Finished! All that UI work I didn't want to do? Finished! There's only a small amount of work I actually have to do, which includes:
- Implementing the achievements (easy)
- Small edits to the current UI
- Finishing the new enemies (3-4 days at max)
- Bug fixing, then sending it all off to the playtesters (????)
- Finishing the clashing UI
Aside from that, I also have to update the Steam page and make a trailer for Polyrhythm, which is just more annoying than it is difficult. And I can't even fully do that until the new clashing UI is done.
I'd like to say it's not a lot, but there is a chance not all of it will be finished by the time I like, so I will be very hesitant about the exact release date. More on that later.
Still, the game's drought is surely finally to a close, and that means I have to work harder than ever to ensure that Polyrhythm is the best update this game has seen.
Since this update is pretty massive, I thought I'd detail a bunch of information about the launch here.
Q • A
Right, let's get on with it!
How much content is in this update?
Well, I'm glad you asked, random kid! In terms of raw content, there is:
-23 new Products
-42 new Cubes
-About 6 new Achievements
I don't know about y'all, but that's a lot! For comparison, the game launched with 73 Cubes and about 50 Products. For an update that focused on UI work, that's not bad!
There are a lot less achievements because quite frankly I couldn't think of anything, and I didn't want to force it. I imagine all the reworks and nerfs will make for a new experience for returning players, too.
How equal is each build now?
I'm not sure.
I think Burn, Discard, Bleed, and Glacial were already more than good status effects before. If I had to comment on the others...
Sentiment had a huge glow-up this update and should be up there with the rest. A lot of the new Cubes have much better application, and now they have forms of higher damage via Pleasure and Butterfly Bullet.
Focus is...fine. I don't know if it's boring or if I just don't like it.
And to end off with Emotions, it is an incredibly interesting keyword now. It's only brought down by the fact that
A: They don't have enough content
B: Emotions as a keyword is bogged down by some bullshit that hardly even qualifies, making rerolls incredibly annoying.
The latter I can fix with the time I have left, the former depends.
There's also some new support for cross keyword builds like Crystalline-Burn or Glacial-Burn. Why is it just Burn...?
Soundtrack?
Since the Severance-Vysis expansion will be complete with the release of Polyrhythm, I'll be uploading all of the battle themes from 0.1-0.4 onto my Youtube channel in the days following the update.
Polyrhythm introduces two new tracks, Thunderstorm and Refrain of Building Blocks. Now that everything's on Youtube, I can officially name tracks! For some reason, it's a little exciting...
Is there any other way to support the game?
Besides just reading the devlogs and sharing your thoughts, nah, not really.
Buuut! A Patreon will potentially drop sometime after the update. Which, again, depends on how much interest there is in it.
I want to release new enemies alongside new characters after Griffn's Side Story is finished, and I kindaaa need more money to do that!
So far, Griffn's Side Story is planned to have three playable characters who aren't Griffn. They are, quite frankly, WAY above the power level of any person that has been introduced so far, so I want them to be super flashy!
I also don't think I'll give any of them alternate forms, except Griffn of course. They are all strong-willed people who wouldn't let themselves fall into other paths. Besides, the game already has a LOT of characters, ten different ones if you count alternate forms...
As a little sneak peek, one of those characters is planned to be Director
WIP character sheet of the Director, as she appears in Snow Ward's Station Excerpt.
"I will serve my people to my dying breath. If that makes the 'bad guy,' then you may hold me in contempt as you like."
Speaking of money... price increase?
NO!
This game's gonna be five bucks for a long while. I don't feel super good about charging any more when the story is essentially just the prologue and four loosely connected character cutscenes, if connected at all. I may increase it when Anthoney's Side Story rolls around, though.
If that'll even happen, lol.
What's next?
Oh, boy. That's a hard question.
Well, I won't be working on story content quite yet. Instead, I'll be slowly patching in some new content that I wanted to fit in this update but considered it too much. Such things include:
- More Cubes for finish off the weaker keyword builds
- Station Descriptions for ALL of the Stations present in the game, not just the ones with 3+ Products
- A character cutscene for Mika, featuring Euryale, maybe
- Replayable character cutscenes and insight on how they were created
And depending on how well this update performs, I'd like to work on Griffn Side Story 01 after that.
But...and here's the heavy but...while I work on Griffn Side Story, I was thinking about switching Snow • Fall to a different engine.
Snow • Fall was made entirely in pygame, with a little bit of moderngl on the side. For those of you unaware, pygame is not super optimal for making games! What other engines give you for free (e.g., mouse collision, animation, physics,) I have to code in myself.
While not a big deal, my shit coding is GOING to catch up with me eventually. I planned out a few enemy decks from the guys at Kisaragi Station, and they are VERY gimmicky fights that rely on editing the UI, something that pygame cannot do without slowdown.
If that happens, then...yes, there is going to be another content drought comparable to this one, if not longer. However, the result will be a Snow • Fall that is much easier to look at and one that is much easier to run, too.
If I end up going with that option, I'll let y'all know.
Parting • Words
This section will also contain the estimated release date for 0.4, so please read it. Allow me to be serious for a moment.
This update has been a journey for me. Not only technically, but mentally, too. I was forced to wrestle with a problem that I had been struggling with for a very long time, and I think I managed to pour each and every part of my soul into Caiyin's character, who even the playtesters have not seen fully.
I want to be a popular person, I want people to speak of flower baasket even when I'm not aware of it. I want to make a game that people can wholeheartedly say that they love, but I find myself increasingly frustrated by the things I cannot do. The only thing I can do is hide and pretend to be someone I'm not.
Caiyin is not too dissimilar to me. She dreams of great heights, and yet cannot handle the wave of failure that comes with improving. This all accumulates into laziness and nihilism, looking for increasingly unhealthy activities to distract herself from her own mediocrity.
Yet, this is not the Caiyin you see in game. The Caiyin you play as is loud, strong, and confident.
In truth, everybody can be an amazing and powerful person. It's just that there's no convenient button that will suddenly turn you into your ideal self. As long as you're willing to struggle through, then somewhere along the line, your problems will disappear, too.
Really, I've met so many amazing and talented people through this project. Sponsors I've collaborated with, artists and voice actors I've met, friends I've made--the me from two years ago would not have believed the person I am today. In a way, this was exactly what I wanted.
I hope to have this update out late August or early/mid-September. Hopefully through Polyrhythm, my feelings can be expressed properly, and, hopefully, it'll be popular enough to reignite some interest back in the game. Wouldn't that be nice?
Oh well. I've said it once before, and I'll say it again. Snow • Fall will only end development once people lose interest, or when the game is finished. As long as people are willing to hear my stories, then I will be glad to read them.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for coming this far.
