Off To The Races!
Welcome to the first post of the REM Cycles development blog! Here, we’ll be talking about all the various goings-on in development, showing off screenshots and videos, and keeping you updated about testing opportunities and release date changes. We’ll organize our updates into categories based on department to make them easier to find!
Design and Programming
Since we started working on the game in January, we’ve designed mechanics for 8 of our 10 planned characters; 5 are currently playable. We’ve also designed 3 bosses, 8-10 NPCs, and a ton of smaller enemies. The six exploration areas have been designed, too, and two are playable internally! We’ve also designed and implemented a “resting” area, which is where support conversations will take place. We’ve made a lot of changes since January, so we should probably update our design doc--oops! Most of our recent work has been deciding on and implementing UI, which we’ll talk more about below.
The resting area!
Music and Sound Effects
For a while, we had placeholder music and sound effects for stages and actions that were pulled from other games that we thought would match well with the game’s aesthetic (an overused word, I know). Since we hired our sound designer a few weeks ago, though, that’s changed for the better! We now have custom music for the title screen, the two playable exploration areas, and the resting area, as well as an array of sound effects for menus, move selections, and more. Groovy!
Art and UI
UI has been big on our collective mind for the past few weeks. We’ve designed text boxes, menus for initial character selection and healing/item swapping in between levels, action menus, and HP bars, oh my! Nothing is final yet, but we’re loving the way things are coming together. On the more artsy side of things, 6 of our 10 planned characters and our main antagonist have portrait art, sprites, and animations. All three designed bosses have art and animation, as well as the two playable stages plus another that hasn’t been programmed yet. We have a cute little house for the characters to stay in and a beach for them to hang out on, not to mention a litany of enemies for them to fight. Things are looking cuter and cuter!
This is Sunny, one of our level NPCs!
Writing
The game’s main story is solid and in place, so there won’t be any more changes to that. All of the NPCs also have dialogue, including an NPC-run tutorial for new players. Throughout the story, there are a few non-interactive “cutscenes” that have dialogue; those have already been written as well. All 8 of our in-development characters have fully interchangeable barks for all six exploration areas. There are also unique conversations between every possible pair of characters, which currently adds up to 28 support conversations, each of which has 3 “episodes”. (Save me.) We’re also planning on 2-3 “paralogues” for each character. In Fire Emblem terms, paralogues are special stages that go along with conversations. They’ll need their own dialogue, but we haven’t decided which of our ideas we want to use yet, so those will be written later. As soon as we come up with our last 2 characters, we’ll get started on their in-game lines and conversations!
It’s true!
Whew, that’s a lot of stuff! Future update posts won’t be quite as long, as we had to account for 4 months’ worth of development here. We’re moving at a good pace now, and we can’t wait to show you what we have in store next!