Setting The Scene
Hello and welcome back to our dev blog! Despite all the election madness in the US, we’ve been working hard at finishing the game. The end is definitely in sight: we’re working on implementing the final cutscenes and boss arrangements, and we only have a few more assets to make. Because what we’ve been working on so far has been fairly condensed, I’m not going to separate our updates by department this time. Read on to see just what we’ve been working on!
Kara summons a decoy!
As we mentioned above, our most important task recently has been putting cutscenes in. We’ve had them planned out for a while, but as we were just able to finish the bosses, we can finally actually implement the scenes around them. (We haven’t really tested everything yet - we want to make the game content-complete before we start tweaking things so we have an accurate idea of how everything fits together.) As we put each cutscene in, we’re finding a few additional assets that we didn’t know we needed. Sarah has been making so many cool backgrounds and sprites for us, and we can’t wait to show them to you!
While combat hasn’t been tested yet, dialogue and support conversations are finished with that process. Emily’s job for the past couple of weeks has been going through each conversation and tweaking character expressions, checking for missing/broken lines and conditionals, adjusting grammar, and logging bugs in all of the text. This resulted in a 56-page document, complete with screenshots, of lines that needed to be changed and their locations. As Faith would say, EEK!
Barring a few individual dialogues that need unique adjustments, just about everything with the support conversations is ready to go, which feels great! There are currently 55 different support arcs in the game, each of which consists of three conversations. Most excitingly so far, we now have backgrounds for all of the conversations! There are a couple of different places where conversations take place; each of these locations has its own static, rendered background. We also have several different music tracks depending on the nature of the conversation. We’re so close to putting them all together!
Here’s one of our background scenes - a sort of beachy woods where several of the characters go for walks.
Speaking of music, we’ve been mulling over a couple of ideas for our credits theme for a few weeks now. We’re still not sure what we want to do, but we know we want it to be impactful, as we’ve all put a lot of love and time into this game. Other than that, most of the music and sound effects are done, which adds to everything feeling “complete.”
That just about wraps things up for this month’s dev update! I know it doesn’t sound like much, but really, most of the hard work is done. It’s been really fun and fulfilling to see everything come together, and we’re very excited to show you the finished product in the not-so-distant future. As usual, stay tuned to our Twitter for the very latest news and screenshots, and check out our Discord if you’re interested in helping us test the game. We’re sharing Francine’s in-character posts for the first time on Twitter, and we’d love for you to get to know our most recent playable character!
Until then, see you next time!