Balance
Hey everyone! It’s your friendly neighborhood writer here, ready to deliver a new development update straight to your eyeballs. We’ve been doing a lot of important work during the last month or two, but it’s the kind of work that doesn’t always result in pretty social media images or quippy posts - it’s balance. As Aiza would say, everything needs to be in balance, and that’s been our primary focus recently.
This is what quarantine feels like.
Design and Programming
A lot of our balance work has been taking place in the design department. After a good bit of testing and tweaking, we decided to overhaul one of our bosses, as it just wasn’t fun or intuitive to play against. We’re going to design a new one that hopefully still showcases the mechanics of the area it’s in (not telling you which one!) while being more fun to play against.
In addition to adjusting bosses, we’ve been doing some early bug-hunting in our support conversations. On the technical side of things, this means implementing cutscenes with sprite movement, text boxes, and backgrounds. We still have a ways to go on this one, but many of the movements and lines for pre- and post-boss cutscenes are in the game in a basic form. It’s really cool to see this come together - cutscenes are definitely something I associate with a “finished” game, so this makes it all the more real.
Finally, we’ve decided to tweak our end-of-room rewards by offering the player a treasure chest with an item that changes based on how quickly they get to it. The idea is that the faster you get to the treasure chest - which is totally optional - the better the item will be. This rewards players for thinking quickly and playing aggressively instead of just turtling in a corner and letting the enemies come to you, which is definitely the way I normally play strategy games. It took us a few days to get that one figured out, but it’s finally up in the game! Look for it in a build coming soon.
Art and Animation
Speaking of treasure chests, we now have art and animations for them! They’ll be themed after the area in which you find them, sort of like Terraria’s chests. The items available in each chest will change from area to area, so you’ll definitely want to try and find them all.
Treasure aside, most of our art effort has gone into perfecting the game’s UI. We created a map select screen over the course of a week or two, and it matches the mid-level and character status screens that we’ve shown before. Beyond UI, we’ll also be working on static backgrounds for support conversations and a couple of last-minute NPCs that we decided to throw in. The new boss that we design will also be getting art soon, and I’m sure it’ll be just as cool as the one we had to toss!
Music and SFX
Most of our music and sound effects work is done, but we have had a few new tracks added recently. Our favorite is the map selection track, which goes along with the new map selection screen we mentioned above. We’re also working on a final credits track, which I think will be the best one yet!
In addition to a couple new tracks, we’ve added a new sound effect for the treasure chest and tweaked music and SFX across the game. It’s amazing how the right sound can make an action or movement that much more satisfying. I can’t wait for everyone to hear the map selection theme in the next build!
Writing
Like the game’s music, most of its writing is already done. Our writing work for the last few weeks has been mostly going through the supports that are in the game already (I’d say 85% are in the current build) and bug-testing them. Along the way, we also caught some grammar mistakes, fixed some weird sentences, and adjusted the portrait expressions that go along with each line.
Speaking of expressions, we noticed that having each character smile blankly while saying otherwise-heated lines broke the immersion a little bit, so we decided to use our different emotion portraits for in-map and cutscene lines in addition to support conversation lines. This should make things a lot smoother. The new portraits aren’t quite in the build yet, as we just finished assigning them on the script today, but they’ll exist in an upcoming build!
Finally, we’ve been posting all of our in-character posts on Twitter for the last few weeks, so if you want to learn more about the game’s characters, that’s the place to be! We’re about halfway through the cast - Raven’s posts are up right now. She was definitely my favorite character to write. (Isgard was second!) You can also check out some fun memes on our Twitter, like this one we posted a few weeks ago that answers the question “What would your characters do in a bar fight?”
I made a small mistake here: Kion’s pronouns are they/them, not he/him.
That’s about it for this month’s development update. If you’re interested in playing REM Cycles, you can join our Discord right now and playtest the most recent build! We’ve gotten some great feedback so far, and we’re really looking forward to showing off more polished builds. Feel free to come and say hello!
See you next time!
<3,
The REM Cycles team