Hiya Friends!
This is our first ever devlog 😮. We've been a little quiet the past couple of months, just keeping our head down and working hard, so we thought you all deserved an update. Recently we have been working on The Docks, the 3rd area of our game. This includes making new characters, new buildings, and keeping our quests in mind.
Here are two of our favorite NPCs:
Coco - the owner of Coco's Cafe! A cute little ocelot with a twin in The Park. The sibling rivalry is strong but they work together to make sure the townsfolk get delicious baked good and hot coffee!
Seph (or Persephone) - runs a Seafood store with her lovely wife, Freya! This adorable walrus couple loves to be by the ocean, with Freya doing the fishing and Seph dealing with the costumers. They're the perfect match!
We have a good few more buddies to show, each with a little mission for you to do!
The Road to Release!
There's still a good bit of work to do and we have the timeline all planned out. This month I (Axie) will be working primarily on assets for our last area, the Market! This includes setting up the whole level, the exteriors of some fun businesses, the interiors of 3 businesses for you to explore, and at least 4 new adorable NPCs to help out. Leaf will be focusing on getting in our final 2 mechanics, setting up a more robust quest system, and getting our save system up and running.
We're already making some progress in these area! I have the building for some businesses already set up and in place, and Leaf is hard at work this weekend setting up the last two mechanics so we can play around with them a bit.
Here are some of my favorite building in the market so far! Some will sadly be closed so you won't be able to go in, but don't worry - the Bookstore will always be open!
Next Fest!
The feedback from our demo has been great! Honestly, we were expecting a lot of bugs so it's wonderful to see that there are really only a couple small things people ran into. Since our full game will be short and small, we won't be adding all that much to the demo for Next Fest. Here are a couple things we are working on though:
Controller Support! - we are planning to get full controller support in for Next Fest, hopefully with minimal bugs!
Interacting with NPCs - Right now, our little NPCs that start to walk around after the player finishes clearing the area feel a bit stiff. We are planning to add some general "chatting" animation to them and the ability for the player to interact with them! This won't be super robust, but hopefully it will bring them to life a bit more.
General Bugs - There weren't many bug, but we are working on just update a couple of things that we and others noticed.
So that's it! What's missing?
As you can see, there's still a lot to do and a lot that we wish we could add but just may not have time for before release. While we don't have a specific date in mind yet, we are set on our release in December - because what would be a better time for a snowy game!?
Some things that may be missing at release time:
Localization - this can take a lot of work to set up. While we would love to do it for release, there just might be other things that take priority. We're still working out what languages we would like to include and will push an update for them shortly after release!
Optimization for Steam Deck - While we are hoping for Steam Deck approval in time for release, we still worry a lot about the FPS we are reaching there and have done a lot of research to learn about optimization over the past month. There is still a lot to learn and do, so while we are working toward it, the game may just exist at a lower FPS for a bit until we can learn/do more.
Character Customization - There's not much that we planned to do here, so we're still hopeful that we can add it before release. However, since our main goal is giving the player a lot of fun things to do in the snow, this might just end up coming later with a future update.
Our main focus is still to create a wonderfully relaxing game, full of adorable character, a great festival, and a lot of snow. We're feeling good about our pace so far (even thought it's A LOT for a "small, short" game 😅).
We appreciate you all and the support so far!
Axie & Leaf