The most frustrating dev update (so far)

Last month holiday and work obligations kept me away from game development for a bit of time. (Plug for Deluge, I met up with the author, Riggy2k3, and he's a real one.) When not traveling, I spent a good deal of time (whatever three+ weeks of late nights amounts to) troubleshooting suspicious and random crashes surrounding Starless Umbra's cutscene system.

I won't go into details in this update because there's already a lengthy issue on github I've created, but the result of this ultimately resulted in a rewrite of some of this cutscene system, and a meticulous revert of the gamemaker update interspersed with other things I was working on.

I'm tired so let's talk about those other things.

Localization

My focus skewed a bit more towards localization as I attempted to release a trailer in Japanese for Tokyo Indie Games Summit. Because of the issue mentioned, it became incredibly difficult to record footage for the trailer. I spent some time hardening the tooling and making more of the game UI dynamic, not hardcoded English.

Really all that's left to support now (that I know about) is localizing some character chatter, signposts, and NPC text. Man, RPGs have so much text.

Steam post image I might have shared this already, but don't look too closely. Placeholder translations while I iron out a localization tool I built. Now this is game development!

By the way, I used the word attempted because I was unable to record the new footage, and the trailer is contingent on re-recording all combat segments again. Maybe this month we'll finally see that trailer. Unless you come across an old version of it somewhere else.

Gameplay

Not a ton here, but I'll note two things.

First, I've adjusted the mine cart puzzles more to make switch changes even more obvious, and made the last of the three rooms less tedious.

Second, I'm experimenting with an optional timed hits/parry mechanic to see how it fits into the battle system. Initial tests are fun, but I'll definitely need to get more opinions on it. It will likely be optional and gated behind a passive. Feedback on combat has been that it's either way too boring or way too frustrating/difficult, and my feeling is that stems somewhat from expectations and assumptions people have on the JRPG genre.

Nailing this has been one of the biggest challenges on the game design front: how do I keep things engaging without alienating a certain playerbase? I've added options to adjust the combat pacing (collectively reducing or increasing cooldowns for all enemies and players) but it's something I really want to continue to iterate on. There's plenty to do here, giving combat just a little bit more variety across enemies, maybe environments, and more. This is important for me to get right before I release a demo and continue working on more content.

Art + Assets

Huge shoutouts to SaKo and FJLink for delivering amazing assets for the game last month. Despite the engine issues, seeing these two make progress on portraits and sprites respectively has been inspiring.

I spoke a bit in my last devlog about how in hardening character arcs Amalia had a slight shift to her personality. I try to write her personality somewhere between the trifecta of bright, wisecracking, and cool/indifferent. I approached SaKo about redesigning her portrait and I'm so happy how they turned out.

There's also facial expressions for those portraits and a whole set of redesigned HUD portraits to make better use of the smaller diamond shape.

Yes, Illari canonically has a fang now.

FJLink is continuing his trend of tidying up some character sprites and adding running animations to the main cast. In his own words, "Oskari looks like a main character now!"

And So

I wish I had more to share. This past month was a tough one, but I hope you're finding these updates interesting. Please let me know if there's anything you'd like me to dive into for the next one.

For December, my focus will be very similar to last month: prep things for a demo, maybe try to get another round of playtesting in order, and continue to gather more feedback as I tidy up localization and re-record footage for the trailer.

Thanks for your continued support, interest, and attention.

-Andrew