I thought it would be cool to share what we are doing, hence this update. First of all, although the Town might seem deserted, the work continues behind the shutters!
We have switched to a home office model early during the pandemic. As a team, our origin story is that of working from our bedrooms and we always encouraged working from home when someone was feeling under the weather, so the transition was smooth. We are now scattered all over the country and kept alive thanks to brave pizza delivery people (seriously, everyone who keeps the infrastructure going in these grim times is a hero, kudos to you!).
Meanwhile, we keep working on both Book of Demons: HELLCARD and Book of Aliens. For those of you who are not on our Discord, I will do a quick recap. And encourage you to join the server, of course. It's where we post sneak peeks and where we will organize alpha and beta tests: Discord.gg/bookofdemons
So, without further ado...
Book of Demons: HELLCARD
We finished card rendering subsystems. Sounds straightforward but it was a lot of work actually, we want cards to be super readable, smooth, and clear regardless of scaling and we are using a custom engine. We will probably write a separate post about that later on.
I will also have a better quality gif, Steam size requirements are atrocious ːarchduckː
The card art was a subject of hot debate both internally and with the community on our Discord. We have written a blog post on how the art style evolved and what motivated our decisions.
We are also in the process of reforging the prototype into a production-ready engine. Yet another topic for an upcoming post! The work is progressing smoothly, all things considered.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1201540/
Book of Aliens
In the case of Book of Aliens, we are still tinkering with low-level mechanics, so a lot can (and will) change before release (planned for 2021). We are preserving our playable prototypes, so if all goes according to the plan we would love to show you what the game could have been.
While we tinker, our more artistically inclined part of the team is coming up with coolest ways to render scenes, shaders and, effects. But it all always begins with early concept sketches. Here is a sneak peek of the very earliest paper aliens concepts
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1196230/Book_of_Aliens/
If you don't want to miss sneak peeks like that and have an opportunity to discuss them with us, consider joining our Discord and the Sneak Peek channel there: Discord.gg/bookofdemons
Aside from that, if you would like to support us further simply wishlist the game you are interested in (or both, if that's the case!). Steam offers more visibility to often wishlisted games and that's the best an indie studio without big marketing bucks can count on!
As always,
Stay safe in the paper dungeons ːpaperheartː
Konstanty