Designing Dreams & Discovering Ancient Artifacts

The Dream

Check out a longer version on the blog.

Act 2 expands on our protagonist’s past a bit through a few flashbacks and dream sequences. For one such dream I sat out to create a less comfy, darker, colder version some of my favorite JRPG forests (Phantom Forest from FF6, the Campfire Scene from Chrono Trigger). This scene received some great reception. I wanted to share it here and give you some insight into how I built it.

This is a compilation of a few different assets. The background and foreground parallax layers (trees and fog) I sprited for Heroes of Umbra some 12 years ago (wow!). The map layer trees are heavy edits to Seliel the Shaper’s Gentle Forest. To give the scene cohesion I matched everything to the game’s palette.

Lastly, Gamemaker doesn’t have a simple way (as far as I can tell) to seamlessly wrap maps. So I went the other way around. Characters are stationary and I have two duplicate tile layers, one offset by the room width, that scroll and wrap around. This avoids having to export another parallax sprite the size of my map.

The Team

The team’s growing! I’m finally getting some help again!

Fran, aka FJLink, is helping on the art side, primarily focusing on tidying up some of my very rough sprites and adding things like running poses. In the past, he’s worked on Latka and Broken Alliance, and I’m so grateful to have more help on sprites. Here’s his work on some touch-ups to Amalia, to make her more closely match the concept art and smooth out some of my roughness with the original sprite.

I’m also pleased to announce Brandon McKagan is helping me move away from royalty-free music and writing some original music for the game. Brandon reached out to me way back in 2012 wanting to compose Heroes of Umbra’s soundtrack. His talent spans a jaw-dropping breadth of genres and his music for HoU is really what transformed a simple prototype into a game I wanted to develop and release (over a period of 6 years on train rides to and from work!). I'll share what he's cooking in a future update.

The Artifacts

Okay, maybe not ancient artifacts. But in digging through storage, I found several posters and stickers I designed for marketing at various anime conventions and events. The fabled scratch and sniff stickers from 2011 are back! And because I kept the extras sealed, they still have their scents.

I’m also opening preorders for a first-ever Starless Umbra T-Shirt. I decided on a short preorder window of two weeks. This allows you to get the size you want and order in bulk to keep costs down. I’m tossing in extra goodies for purchasing during the preorder window, so please pick one up.

Check out the Alcuria Games shop!

What’s Been Done, What’s Next?

I’ve polished up a good chunk of Act 2, and it’s coming together. The revisions are all in place and the act feels largely more cohesive. (I talked about this in my devlog this summer, check out The Setback section if you aren’t sure what I’m referring to.) My original plan wrapping up Act 2 was to immediately start on Act 3, but I’m actually not sure that’s the best approach.

I’ve shared demos prior, but I’d consider those more betas. Parts of the battle system are not totally implemented, tutorials are hacked together, controllers & settings are still pretty buggy. It feels like a great opportunity to spend a few months tidying things up and getting to a level of polish that I’m pleased with.

And in the mean time, I can write scenes for Act 3, but I should not be in any rush to implement those. I can’t afford to implement another story arc I’m dissatisfied with. I’ll announce it in a few months when it’s ready, but I’m planning another round of beta tests for Act 1+2. Should be fun!

Thanks for reading! As always, appreciate your support and looking forward to sharing more.