Howdy!
First off, I'd like to thank everyone who's been following the project so far, and everyone who's wishlisted - it means a lot!
I'm "Mega" - lead developer. I do basically everything aside from the visual art, and originally started this project completely solo. Honestly, I never expected it to get this far - having a steam page feels unreal even a week later.
I'll be doing these devlogs every 1-2 weeks to share progress as we approach the end of the summer and, hopefully, our demo release. This log will be more of an overview of what we have left to do.
I have four main goals in mind, things that must be done before I'd consider the demo "good enough":
A full-featured tutorial. This is my current target, and probably the most important thing here. The main point of feedback in previous playtests was the the mechanics were unclear, and the game felt overly knowledge-demanding. This is getting close-ish to done, and I'll probably be running a "tutorial playtest" soon. Join the Discord if you're interested, I'll be sharing it through there. Full details on this will be in the next devlog (probably).
Complete dialogue scenes (and overall Chapter 1 story). Most of the systems for dialogue are in place, I have a functioning prototype set up, but we still need to finish a lot of visual art and writing.
Midgame boss. Since the demo will consist of Chapter 1 only, I want to include some later-game content to give a sense of "where things will go" with the mechanics. This fight has a more-or-less completed design, has art in progress, and hasn't started implementation yet. I think it should make some of my inspirations, especially FFXIV raid design, much more clear.
Polish, Polish, Polish. Battle has lots of rough visual edges - animations are sparse and lack impact, sound is barely implemented, post-processing is completely untouched, etc. This is an ongoing process rather than a discrete step, but that means progress is always being made. I think I've found a good process for animations and icons, so thats the next immediate step.
I don't have anything this week, but hopefully going forward I'll include an art or music teaser alongside these posts. Thanks for reading, and please Wishlist if you haven't already!