Demo time 🎉
Let's get this thing out into the world
Hello again! It is hot. Proper July in Georgia 100 degrees for a whole month nonsense.
We took a break from Substack for June. A couple of vacations mixed with a couple of game sprints meant us focusing mostly on going full steam, polishing up this demo.
Which, I’m excited to say……… is finally ready for testing!!!
It’s a huge milestone for us. Up to this point, we’ve only shared the game with friends, family and a few other game devs in our circle. We’re finally ready to beat this thing up a bit with people who haven’t spent the last year-and-change staring at every pixel of the game.
We’re going to start lugging our Steam Decks to various game dev meetups in Atlanta / Brooklyn. Amanda and I will be at the ATL GameDevs meetup at My Parents’ Basement on August 5th. Patrick will be at Wonderville in Brooklyn on July 29th. Feel free to come play if you’re local!
We’re hoping to do a few more playtest events in the next few months, so if you know of any in Atlanta / NYC please let us know. 🙂
Once we’ve worn down the rougher edges, we are planning to share the demo with remote playtesters (like any of you fine people willing to give it a go). So be on the lookout for more info!
In the meantime here’s some bits and pieces of things we’ve made recently:
An ominous Silent gate
Look at it lookin at you.
An intro sequence
Amanda painstakingly frame-by-frame animated the letters that Patrick illustrated for our logotype. And since Opie falls from the cosmos, she gave him a dramatic entrance.
Brassy instrument prototyping
I’ve been prototyping an instrument upgrade Opie finds to help break through trickier Silence. As you keep time with the little indicator, Opie plays a big brassy melody, which pops nearby Silence creatures. Failing the timing causes the Silence to run away and regenerate.
Once we’ve tightened up the mechanics, we’ll do a visual pass with it to make it look nice and cohesive.
Into the third dimension
Our game is 2.5d. Meaning we use flat illustrations in a three-dimensional space. We do this primarily so we can keep the visual style really consistent.
Recently, we realized we just couldn’t get our game’s environment looking right without some actual 3d models mixed in. Which… none of us really know how to do. I made a log with some mushrooms on it one time and I think it took me like two weeks. And honestly, it looked like garbage.
Thankfully, Patrick offered to give it a shot… He sort of went into a hole for 4 or 5 days, and when he came out, he could model in Blender, unwrap UVs and paint on textures… because that’s just the kind of madman that he is. If you know him you’re probably not surprised by this at all hah.
Game of the month
I haven’t been playing any games this past month really, since this demo push (and life and having kids and other projects) has been absorbing a lot of that time. I did start Zelda: Majora’s Mask (again) and want to write about it soon. What an insane game.
See you next time!