Rested and Ready To Work
It’s that time again! We’re back with another blog post to update you on the development of REM Cycles. This one will be a little different than previous ones, though. The team has been juggling a lot over the last few weeks, from other jobs to moving to relative visits. Because of all that chaos, we haven’t made as much progress as we normally would in a month. Along with talking about what we have done, we’ll discuss what we plan to have finished in the near future. It’s an exciting time for us, as we’ve got a solid base to go off of and can now start thinking outside the box.
We’ll get the bad news out of the way first: we submitted demos to two publishers several weeks ago, and about a week later, one turned us down. That’s okay, though—we know we have something special here, and we’re going to keep working as hard as we can to share it with people.
This is a snapshot of the Pridelands, one of our six areas!
Design and Programming
Most of the design work for the last several weeks has involved enemies and bosses. We’ve designed all the regular enemies and the boss for the Townlands, otherwise known as area 5 out of 6. All of them have unique attacks and moves, so the area is sure to be a challenge, even if you’ve bested all of the areas before it. (Did we mention? Besides the tutorial area and the final area, you can play the remaining areas in any order.) We’ve designed it with area attacks in mind, which is something we haven’t included in a lot of our characters up to this point. In addition to making character #10 primarily an area attacker, we’re going back and adding area attacks to a handful of characters, mostly damage-dealers.
Over the next few weeks, we’re planning on adding break zones to each area. These will occur halfway through each area and will be a place to heal your characters, receive a buff, and meet a unique NPC. We’re still working out exactly what the buffs will be—up until a week ago, we were going have the NPC give out an item instead—but the goal is to have it focus on one character of the player’s choice. Choose wisely! We’re also still getting the Pridelands and Lavalands bosses implemented, but as they both have art, animations, and mechanics waiting, hopefully that shouldn’t take too long.
Art and Animation
While we were designing enemies and bosses, Sarah Boeving was giving them physical form! We have art and animation for all of the Townlands enemies and art for the boss, with its animations coming very soon. We’ve also been thinking ahead to our very last area, whose theme will remain a secret for now. For a Pixel Dailies submission, Sarah made a little eyeball creature. We liked it so much that we decided to make it an enemy!
Our leggy friends are here to play!
Our immediate priority is getting the Townlands boss’ animations finished, which hopefully won’t take very long. It went through a couple of design iterations, so its mechanics will be adjusted as well. After that, we’ll be looking forward to the last area in terms of environment, enemies, and bosses. We’re also thinking about some new social media templates for in-character posts and backgrounds for support conversations. As far as we’ve come, there’s still plenty to do!
Music and Sound Effects
These past few weeks have been all about sound effects! Most of the actual music is finished, so we’ve drawn up a list of sfx that we’ll need for attacks, movement, text, and many other things. Felix Arifin is handling those, so look forward to some sounds that are just as groovy as our area themes! Beyond that, we’ll be looking at additional themes for support conversations (we already have one) and music for our final, secret area. We’re also considering music for the end(s) of the game, so stay tuned for more news on that!
Writing
Most of our writing work for the past several weeks has been revision. We’ve created character #10, our final playable character, and given her a name, personality, and barks. (We’re not revealing her right now, but she is significantly based on French entertainer Josephine Baker.) It took a while to write her first support conversation; hopefully things will go more smoothly now that we have a sense of her voice.
We’ve had a lot of enemy changes recently, so another chunk of the writing was in-game bestiary entries for each enemy and boss. We also have descriptions of the attacks and moves of each enemy, which we update every time we adjust mechanics. Finally, remember the mid-level NPCs we mentioned above in the design section? Their dialogue needs to be adjusted to match the buffs they’re giving out, so that will be changed this week. The next few weeks will see all of character #10’s support conversations written along with a few smaller tasks like adjusting the NPC dialogue. As always, stay tuned to Twitter to learn more about our characters!
This is character #7, aka Raven!