Hey, it’s been a while

We’ve been pretty quiet for some time and are very sorry about that. We’re going to rectify that by getting back on the communications and keeping everyone up to date. We still really want to deliver this game. A lot of things have changed while we’ve been working on Lanterns, for example, when we started we didn’t all have full time jobs, we do now. Juggling work, life stuff and trying to finish a fully fledged game is tricky, but we are still tinkering away to make sure Lanterns gets out the door and is super enjoyable. Hopefully this little update gives a glimpse into what we’re working with.

Any other challenges?

We had some challenges locking down our art direction but have rejigged some of the vision and are pushing forward with new assets to bring the game to life. We’re a bit behind where we want to be, however the team has been flexible and is moving forward.

Some of the team also experienced personal loss and the challenges that come with that over the last 9 months. This isn’t so much of an excuse but it’s worth mentioning.

So when can I play the thing?

We want Lanterns to be in your hands well before Christmas but looking to release by Thanksgiving.

A couple things we’ve been working on:

Character Art

Few comments on the direction -maintaining some the feel of our old placeholder art but trying to bring a little more detail and character to our brave anthropomorphs. We mentioned art style before and we have developed the pixel art style to be a little more detailed and capture a bit more personality.

Content

With some of our in house tech sorted out and our art being locked down our levels will be reworked and mostly remade to feel more like a full game. Many of the levels in the current build are test levels for how our mechanics work and often make the difficulty curve feel janky. We’ll smooth that out as we rebuild the content structure over the next couple months.

There's a few more things we're playing with behind the scenes but we'll lift the curtain again soon.

If you got this far, thanks for reading. We really appreciate those who have kept encouraging us and stuck with us all this time. If you have any feedback for us feel free to drop us a line via Steam or our Discord server.

• The Artefact Team