This is going to be a short update this month. In part it's because we already shared the big news! The demo is live and people are playing it. Thanks to everyone who has given it a go, I would love your thoughts and feedback on the game. There's a feedback button right in the pause menu and a few people have already sent in some very thoughtful suggestions (which I'm working on). There's a lot of potential QoL features that are just hard for me to see because I'm so familiar with the game as it is.
The second reason for a short update is that I just welcomed a new little baby into my family. She's doing great and is a little sweetheart, but as a result I've had less time to work on the game the past few weeks. This will improve soon as we all get into our new rhythms, but progress has slowed.
Having said that, I do have things to show off this month. In addition to all the prep and testing for the demo, I've been working on new missions! I have about 10 that are playable so far. Not pretty but playable. And it's been amazing to be able to test out the XP and progression systems over a larger set of missions.
When we sat down to carve out the full game story into missions we ended up deciding to alter the pacing a bit. As a result I've been repurposing the missions you see in the demo. Mission 1 is still in there but has a slightly different story beat. As a result mission 2 needed to be reworked to be larger as it happens later on. Mission 3 is currently on the cutting room floor, but may get used as part of Alto’s campaign, we'll see.
My plan is to get all of Maebh’s missions playable as my next goal. I expect that many of them will need significant tweaks before the end and some may be wholesale rebuilt or reimagined. I'm playing around with a lot more of the complex mission conditions to make sure they work as expected and make for a compelling mission. Kill all enemies/ kill the boss/ seize the goal gets pretty boring and I really want to try out some totally novel mission objectives to keep things interesting.
I have some art help who will be joining the team in September/October so I'm holding off on significant artwork and letting the placeholder assets pile up.
Until then.