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Wow, looks beautiful! Good luck with this game. I'm keeping my eyes on it! :)

An RPG with watercolor art and no combat!! I'm so into this. Your visuals so far are looking lovely. I can't wait to see more screenshots!

Stunnniiinnng. Looking forward to seeing more.

Posting to see the watercolors later.

Devlog #1 - Numbers everywhere

Hi everyone! I decided to start writing bi-monthly devlogs to help us stay motivated. Pardon in advance for my wonky grammar  :gentleman:


The cities of the rainbow
Last months were mainly spent working on worldbuilding, lists of items and prices. We decided to have seven main cities, each one with a local product:

The blind priests of the sun-god live in the red city in the desert. They sell mirrors, telescopes, and other intricate examples of glasswork.

The orange city is a giant tank from the Old War, now home of countless rascals and swindlers. Its inhabitants use the still-working engines' power to cut and carve wood.

The yellow city is your tipical medieval fantasy town, but with bees. Bee products like honey and wax are the main source of income.
It's also the starting point of the adventure - we liked the idea of greeting the player with a familiar setting, so s/he can learn the game mechanics before starting to worry about the lore.

The city of green is the home of the plant people, and of wizard-botanists capable of changing vegetables in strange and endearing ways. They grow plants for food and much more.

In the city with cyan-colored walls, people make cloth from seaweeds and dye them with crushed crustaceans.
They also catch fishes that also are books.

Indigo city lies between the mountains, and is full of miners extracting stone and minerals from the bellows of the Earth.
Geothermal energy was abolished when the world became Still. Nobody knows exactly how the mining process is fueled.

Violet is not a city. It's a lost army.
The cold killed their mounts and their engines and their hometown. They now live in the frozen carcasses of their war-beasts. They pray strange gods and mingle with the spider people.
They sell informations you don't really want to know.


Items and categories
We,'re trying to give strong pros and cons to each item category, so the gameplay won't be reduced to a simple "buy low, sell high".
For example, stone is really heavy and will slower your cart, but is highly profitable. Food, on the other hand, is simple to store and easy to sell everywhere, but can spoil during your journey (so carrying stone and food together is actually a very bad idea!)


Setting the price
I finally started programming the core of our game: the bartering system.
For now, whenever you ask for an item's price, the game looks at:
- Where you are. each city has its local product, other easily available items, and rare/difficult to obtain products. The game check the item's category and multiply its base price according to the place.
- The vendor. Some are greedier than others.

EXAMPLE
Let's say you want to buy candles in the red city.
The item base price is 50 gold. The red city is near to the yellow one, so candles are a common good. The base price is raised only to 120%, so 60 is the medium price of candles in the red city.
A common vendor in the market street might raise this price by another 5%, because he's greedy like that. A wholesaler could instead lower the price, but will only accept orders in bulk.

If you decide to buy something, you'll have to make an offer. Bartering will then begin, but we'll talk abut this in two weeks!  :blink:

This project sounds promising and looks beautiful. Devblog posts really are a good way to keep you motivated and of course a nice way for the fans to follow the progress. I would also like to see more of those watercolour graphics!

Does the team have previous experience in game development? It's often hard to keep the scale of the project in control when you're making an awesome game that you're passionate about. At least for me it is. :D

Good luck and keep posting! I'll be following.  :blink:

What a lovely art style! Looking forward to them weekly watercolours, looking nice!! The idea of an RPG with watercolours, yeah I agree, sounds amazing. Also there's a couple of pages on the forums about tips for Kickstarter campaigns, I can't name them all from the top of my head (maybe someone else can link to better posts), but I recall the thread for Moonlighter having some pointers and types of things to do to prep for those sorts of campaigns. Anyways, good luck with the game~

Many thanks to everyone! We're very glad to know you like the artstyle.

I myself, the main programmer/writer, had tons of experience with rpgmaker when I was younger. I know it isn't "real" programming, and I never produced anything of note, but I perfectly know how the program works and its limits.
(I also make Twine games! Look, they are in my signature!)
The other team members are comic book artists. They have no real experience with games, but we already worked together, have a good workflow and can respect deadlines.
For a game of this scope, with many dialogues and no real gameplay aside from bartering, this shoud be enough.


I know, I know! When I was an ambitious noob with rpgmaker I alwas wanted to make huge jrpgs with 80+ hours of gameplay, tangled plots and loads of dungeons. Of course, I never finished anything. However, Selling Sunlight features an open-ended world with no linear plotline, so keeping the scale in control should be easier.
As soon as the core mechanics are in place, the game is playable. Adding more locations and npcs means adding layers and layers of content to a system that already works.

The rough roadmap is:
- Set the gameplay mechanics in place (bartering, item management, stats etc)
- Make two cities with basic locations, characters, and the tutorial
- Launch demo
- Everything works? One by one, make the other five cities with major npcs/plotlines
- Still has time and money to spare? Add more npcs and minor cities

This means any time after the demo, we can call it quits and still have a game. Short and not much interesting, but it's a game! And we think that's very important; because even if we fail to finish it, for whatever reason, we'll still have something playable to show around.

This is an absolutely beautiful concept not to mention the illustrations you have showed so far! This: "They sell informations you don't really want to know." line really got me. I love the mixture between trading and dialogue you seem to be going for and cannot wait to hear more! Any chance you will make the bi-monthly updates an email newsletter? I would definitely subscribe.

I had a question about gameplay, do you plan to add the ability to rent a store area in a city so that you can possibly sell goods while out and about? Or perhaps the ability to hire scavengers to find resources in the wild?

Looks fantastic! The aesthetic reminds me of the Lanfeust comic series in a way, mainly the more stylised Lanfeust of the Stars, amazing work :) The premise sounds intriguing too, I'm a big fan of dialog heavy RPGs. Looking forward to seeing more!

A newsletter? Nice idea! But first, I'd like to find a native English speaker willing to help me polish my grammar. Anyone interested can apply here (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=56200.msg1251931#msg1251931)! We have a native proofreader for the game itself, but she's working full-time and I'd prefer not to bother her with this kind of stuff.
(I'm really frustrated by my ability to scatter little grammar errors everywhere. I swear to you, I'm a great writer... In another language.)

I long thought about this, and ultimately decided against adding such features. Crafting and shops, while entirely reasonable in context, would loosen the game's focus.
You are a traveling merchant. Your purpose is to go around, visit strange places and talk to new people. With a fixed selling point, I know some players would find a convenient trade route and always follow the same routine, preferring easy money to the thrills of exploration.
And I do not like that.

I won't exclude minigames about selling goods, though! Selling food and drinks during a festival or a sport event could be a nice diversion, and better fit with the whole "traveling merchant" theme.

I think the decision about focusing on being a travelling merchant makes sense! Really excited to start seeing the minigame concepts too!

Devlog #2 - Apples and oranges

Hi everyone! Time for another update. This is what we've done over the last few weeks:


GAMEPLAY
The bartering system taking shape so we decided to share it with the world. After all, it's the core of our gameplay!
Here's a screenshot with BAD PLACEHOLDER ART EVERYWHERE:

(http://i.imgur.com/vYHUu8B.jpg)

Whenever you are buying or selling something, you can choose to barter with the other merchant. The aim of bartering is to find a price you both agree on before someone's patience runs low.
While bartering, you can:

    > Change your offer. Raise or lower the amount of cash you're offering.

    > Give an item. Low on cash? Try offering some of your goods.

    > Give a favour. Offer benefits like useful information or a free ride in your cart.

    > Use a skill from the skill wheel.


Skills have very simple effects like raising your opponent's patience or willingness to lower the price. You choose a skill from a wheel divided into four slices.
Each slice of the wheel contains the same 12 skills; what you change is the delivery of them.
You can choose between four different dispositions:

    > Charming. Wink, smile, be fascinating.

    > Friendly. Be a nice and honest fellow.

    > Stern. Rigid, precise, professional.

    > Threatening. Raise your voice and demand things.

For example, if you ask the other merchant to stay calm you can give him: a friendly pat on the shoulder or threateningly grab their shoulder. Both the same gesture but with different attitudes.

Each merchant likes some dispositions better than others. Approach them correctly and you'll have better chances of sealing the deal before their patience runs dry.
For example, take Pacha, the cloth trader of the Green city:

(http://i.imgur.com/LgQS7Bv.jpg)

He's a cool, calm and very honest person so enjoys friendly and austere colleagues. He will react badly to Charming or Threatening actions because he is already a husband and father.


PLOT AND QUESTS
The bartering system already works – it's wonky and full of numbers to balance, but it works. The ambitious part will be making the merchants remember the way you treat them. We don't want a simple “friendship bar” for the NPCs but instead for them to remember your attitude and act accordingly.
For example, if you make business in a friendly or stern manner with Pacha, he will offer to buy and sell goods. You won't receive business proposals from him if you're Charming, but he'll shyly ask for tips to improve his marriage.
Very simple mechanics to program but a living hell to write.
We believe it'll be worth it.


GRAPHICS
We're a little bummed out after our animator left due to their internship and finding a replacement is proving very difficult. We've thought about two different solutions but would like to hear your opinion:

> Draw characters by hand and animate them with Toonboom. We've not used the program before but it should be a good alternative to traditional hand-drawn animations.

> 3D models; we can create and easily animate them but fear the watercolour backgrounds + 3D characters would not blend well. We want to avoid the goofy look of old Final Fantasy games, but are unsure how.

 Any ideas or advice would be incredibly useful at this point. Thanks in advance!

Looking really great! I love the idea of having to determine how to approach the various merchants by listening carefully to their small talk. I also think some basic handrawn animations maybe only a few frames would be needed similar to those in visual novels?

Yeah, surely! In my ideal scenario, there's no "patience" bar for the merchants while bartering: they change expression according to their feelings.
For now we have to keep the frames at minimum, but we'll add more as soon as we have more time and money.
(My character artist will kill me sooner or later.)

Putting the pieces together...

(http://i.imgur.com/xIOlaDv.png)

Devlog #3 - The masked one

When we started working on Selling Sunlight, we didn't plan on having a visible main character. However, the project quickly evolved from a text-based game to a more graphical experience; suddently we had maps, so we needed someone to walk on them! Our character artist made sketches for a male and a female hero, but they felt somewhat... Restrictive.
Our game is a role-playing experience: we didn't want to force on the players a gender/race/face they didn't like. We wanted them to feel perfectly at ease with their in-game identity, but making a proper character editor would have been too draining.
If you can't see your character's face, your mind becomes the editor. So, instead of a face, we designed a mask.

(http://i.imgur.com/f52FyfA.jpg)
(Concept art.)

The default name is Blanc. Their gender is neutral, race will be changeable, and their sexual orientation is up to you. A blank slate of a character, with tons of possible identities hidden behind the disguise.

As soon as we nailed the design, another problem quickly arised: why is this fellow masked?
As a merchant, our protagonist has to daily interact with other people. If the mask was a quirk of their own, it could severely impair their ability to socialize!
The mask needed to stay. At the same time, it needed to be mundane in its weirdness. Something socially accepted, with a clear meaning.
We made it a simbol of penance.
You broke a religious taboo. You have been deemed not worthy to bask your face in the radiance of the sun.

What exactly did your character do? That's up for you to decide, too.
During the first minutes of our game, an NPC will ask you about the mask. The answers you can give are all very vague - ranging from "someone backstabbed me" to "my lover didn't tell me s/he was technically married to the Sun". It's a simple choice, but helps build up the narrative in many neat ways:

- It gently forces the player to roleplay. Blanc is not just your an avatar, but a character who had a life before the start of the game.
You get curious. You want to know more, so you start to speculate. Without even realizing it, you just made a background for your character.

- Estabilish coolness. It's not easy to make a character as mundane as a merchant exciting. But your character broke a taboo; they did something mysterious and wrong and intriguing.
You just started playing and you already know this person is a badass.

- It makes social interactions more natural. It's always jarring when in RPGs, characters you just met give you personal quests or important informations.
But you're an outcast. People will get curious and ask questions. They'll have a good reason to approach you first.


Blanc is our hero, but also our biggest risk: we perfectly know such a strange character can risk alienating the audience.
It's a bold choice, but we think it will only make our game more compelling. Tell us what you think.

As someone who picked up painting via watercolor (I know, odd choice) I approve of this. There aren't a lot of games with a watercolor artstyle, but most of them look superb, such as Child of Light.

Cool world  :)

I love the look of this. The world needs more watercolor games. Keep up the good work!

This looks wonderful!


I think out of these two options, 3D models sound like the hardest to get right within this style, you'd need really solid models and textures for them to blend in. Not sure about toonboom either since I never used it, I hope it is good enough to create subtle animations, instead of typical cartoon animations.

This looks awesome! I loved Spice and Wolf, and wondered right away if that was an influence on the design. Definitely curious to hear some OST samples when you have them - the world itself seems a bit "off" and definitely diverse, so it will be interesting to try to match music to that :)

Thanks! We're really satisfied about the style we choose, feedback so far have been overwhelmingly positive ^^
Watercolors are working well for us for various reasons:
- they're not only pretty, they're distinctive. That's real important when you're a little indie game struggling to get noticed.
- they're easier to pull off than "standard videogame graphics", since we all went to art school and watercolors were the bane of our existence for years.
- using hand-drawn graphic in game is proving to be comfier than expected, thanks to collision maps. We'll talk about this in our next devlog.


Yeah, I fear hand-drawn animations are still our best option. The problem is, the workload is starting to be really heavy for just the three of us.
So, animators, send us your portfolios. We'll need help sooner or later :concerned:


Spice and wolf was definitely an influence! I know there's a DS game based on the franchise, but sadly it's Japanese only and I can't try it... I'd really like to see how they handled the gameplay.

Rune Factory, the Harvest Moon spin-off about living in a fantasy world, was another huge influence. Those games have a (weak) overarching plot, but their true focus are the tons of sub-quests based around interesting NPCs and their personal issues, often interacting with each other. I really loved that feeling of living in a close community of friends, and hope Selling Sunlight will have a similar atmosphere.


First time I heard our composer play, he was beating rocks in front of a microphone and accompanying it with the distorted sounds of an hacked keyboard.
I think he's crazy enough to work with us. Music samples should come by September.

Also consider that having detailed, unanimated portraits is still perfectly acceptable. Just look at newer fire emblem games. I know it may not be ideal, but it may be better than having cartoonish animations or 3D models. 

Portraits will surely be static, and have 2-3 different emotions at maximum. Having a varied cast of NPCs, at the moment, is more important than having lots of fancy animations.
Animations will be needed just for the character sprites. We have maps, at least the main character should be able to walk around.
I fear lots of NPCs will stand very still in our demo. Luckly it's a game about merchants, so it's only natural for them to stay behind a counter  ;D

Ah, I thought you wanted to animate the portraits too, and I thought that was kind of unnecessary. XD
I think for smaller sprites something like toonboom likely works out just fine. I'd try it out :)

Devlog #4 - Sexy bard and the mystery of the flying sofas

Our fearless background artist made the first watercolored backgrounds, so we started putting them into the game!
By default, Rpgmaker can't handle pixel-by-pixel movement, but luckly there are pre-made scripts for that.
We put the drawings as background images, made our collision maps, and put all the parts that needed to stay over the character, like chairs and tables, on a separate level using the titleset editor.
Obviously, bugs were found. Our characters are much taller than rpgmaker's default sprites, so this happened:

(http://i.imgur.com/KY6p8X4.gif)

Our solution? Instead of simple pictures, chairs and tables became "events" - rpgmaker's way of saying "elements of the game programmed to do something".
The games now costantly checks the coordinates of the character, and changes the events proprieties accordingly from "stay above character" to "appear below character". It's convoluted, but it works!

(http://i.imgur.com/tSecSMK.gif)

Hopefully the system won't lag on large maps.

I really like what I'm seeing so far. Good luck with the game!

Yeah, same. it looks gorgeous.

Just passing to say that Selling Sunlight got featured on Siliconera (http://www.siliconera.com/2016/09/24/using-seduction-cunning-outwit-fellow-merchants-selling-sunlight/)!
Expect a new devlog as soon as we stop drinking. Lots of exciting news to share.

Devlog #4 - Getting serious


We have a shiny new website! People have asked for it (it was totally Alexis Kennedy's fault), so we made one - complete with a mailing list - and we've also now got a Twitter account. Follow us for solar blessings, lore tidbits and irregular doses of pretty watercolors.


So, what have we been up lately?


GAMEPLAY
We don't have many new screenshots to show, because we've mostly been coding the foundation of our gameplay: boring stuff like "merchants NPCs (non-player characters) now refresh their stock every month" and "every NPC will only buy certain types of goods from you".

We also spent two weeks coding a system to keep all our in-game text separated from the engine. This means we can now read, write and edit the dialogues without even opening the game. We had to re-format our script for the new system, which was painful and time-consuming, but we needed this to avoid severe headaches while proofreading.


GRAPHICS
We finally have an animator!
Bev Campbell works digitally, but with such grace her work almost looks traditionally colored. She's still trying to find the right art style, but we think her little sprites will blend well with our backgrounds:


We've also been working on the UI. Watercolors aren't the best medium when it comes to creating repeatable patterns, so we're still experimenting. Have a look at the city UI:


Whenever you enter a city from the overworld map, you'll be presented with a screen like this. From here you can select a location to visit, read the area descriptions or check the status of the market in the area. Each city excels at producing a category of goods, like bee products or glasswork, while others are always in demand.


CHARACTER SPOTLIGHT: THE BARD
You've probably seen this smug cutie before: His Blondiness is the poster boy of our game. But who is he, exactly?

Here are four random facts about him:

- He's a magician, and also a bard. The two jobs are roughly the same thing anyway.
- He has an unhealthy obsession with kings, and only tells tales about royalty.
- He loathes mirrors. How does he manage to maintain his look, you ask? Well, he has many lovers. He's probably seeing a hair stylist or two.
- Yes, of course you can flirt with him.

Bonus picture: the bard was our lab rat when we were still experimenting with the art style.

Wonderful art style, I really wish I could draw like that...
Look forward to seeing more of this!

Mushishi? Invisible Cities? Sexy bards? Whatever it is you're peddling, I'm sold already!

Yay, I love this kind of game; don't know how I missed it. (Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't suggest that you should play Nomad by GameTek, one of my all-time favorite games.)

Just a thought about the physics of the world: if a planet tidally locks and manages to keep its atmosphere at all (as opposed to losing all of it to sublimation on the cold side), you should get a strong, cold, constant wind at ground level, and always towards the helling boiling storm at the sunward "pole".  This would have consequences for the world, like in sailing, air travel, and energy.  (Like you'd expect to see lots of windmills, because you can always rely on the wind being there and going in a particular direction, but it'd be a big problem for balloon/zeppelin travel.)

Was the Stilling a sudden change, or just gradual locking over millennia?

Didn't knew about this game, thanks for the suggestion!

Yeah, I read about this, I found a couple of good (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.1025.pdf) essays (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.0515v1.pdf) about the possibilities of life on tidally-locked planets. 
While strong winds will surely be present, I decided they won't be a key focus of the setting. Part of the reason is that Alain Damasio (lore writer of the videogame Remember Me) already wrote an incredible novel (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1397743.La_Horde_du_Contrevent) about a world where the wind never stops blowing.
It's one of my favourite books. It would be hard for me to create a similar setting without being subconsciously influenced by the novel, and the result would feel recycled.
I choose not to compete.

So the world will have frequent and strong tempests, but no costant winds, and this lack of scientific accuracy will be addressed in-game. Magic is involved, but not in a "it's magic ain't gonna explain shit" way - there's a subplot involving mages, spider-people, and their schemes to influence the world's climate. The main character is just a merchant and won't be too involved in global conspirations, but... Befriend the shady corporate overlords right people and you might be able to glimpse something.

Gradual locking over a short time span of a couple of years. This is an important detail of our setting - people understood what was happening, calculated the position of the planet once locked, and fought for a place in the strip of costant sunset.
That's why the map is full of city-states with different cultures, and some of them are very grumpy with each other. The war is officially over, but antipathies don't die so easily.

Devlog #5 - Learning to Fail Better

Happy New Year, everyone! How's your 2017 going? We've been REALLY HAPPY and REALLY SCARED at the same time, so let's start by talking about the big terrifying news:


We've been in touch with the folks of Failbetter Games, creators of award-winning narrative games like Fallen London and Sunless Sea. They have a neat incubation program for beginner indie developers, and managed to find a spot for our writer/programmer (that's me!).


This means I will be able to work in their London offices for a few months, receive a bit of tutoring and learn how a real studio works. What an incredibly scary and exciting experience! That's why we spent the last months screaming - uh, and also working, I swear.
For example, we made a demo. It's a shaky pre-alpha full of bugs and temporary assets, but it's nice to see everything coalesce into a playable build. It's not ready for public testing yet, but we've been receiving feedback from colleagues and friends.

One of the most common critiques was the exaggerated saturation of some backgrounds.
Traditional watercolors are, alas, a complicated medium: the brightness of the colours is dependant on natural sunlight, so putting the drawings in a scanner is a recipe for disaster. Despite a massive dose of post-production, we're still not satisfied with the results.


Cold light scanners could be a solution, but since they are very very costly, we're going to experiment with cameras!
By using a high-resolution camera, we should be able to digitalize our watercolors without losing detail. It will also be interesting to shoot photos with different light condition - to use the sun itself as a post-production filter. It sounds appropriate for our game, doesn't it?

On the other hand, our animator Bev works digitally, and has been facing a different problem: create character sprites that will blend well with traditional art.


Our composer also delivered atest track for the title screen - you can listen to it on Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/user-382639634/selling-sunlight-title-screen/s-IAaal).


That's everything for now! May the Sun shine on your path.

posting to follow development. i lost the thread twice already because i couldn't remember the name.

An interview with Failbetter Games

Hello!
Sorry for the lack of regular updates - I'm still alive, but have been horribly busy.
I was sent to the far North to learn to speak like a True Englishwoman and make better games. The Failbetter Games folks - makers of Fallen London (http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/) and Sunless Sea (http://store.steampowered.com/app/304650/) - decided to pick me up as part of their incubation program.
This interview to the whole team was originally posted on the Failbetter Games Blog (http://www.failbettergames.com/a-new-incubee-giada-zavarise-of-selling-sunlight/):


How did Selling Sunlight come about?

    Giada (writer): I was working in a marketing agency, where I was spending most of my time playing Fallen London during office hours and farming games at home, to heal my soul.

    I was lifeless. I was bored.

    Sometimes you work on an idea carefully, and sometimes influences just brew subconsciously in your head and then explode. At some point I just knew I had to make exactly THIS GAME – then I had a job no more, and so I started making it, because why not. Friends got curious, someone started asking “can I draw the little cute icons for the items?” and a team was formed. Accidentally.


Where does the name Selling Sunlight come from?

    Giada: We made a big list of word related to our game’s main themes, which are:

•         Traveling vs. standing still
•            Buying and selling
•           The sunset
•            Bees

    Then we just meshed the words together until something nice-sounding came out. Not very fascinating, I know.

    Chiara (background artist): I remember we were torn between this title and Sunlight Seller, but Selling Sunlight just rings better.


Tell me a bit about the player character in Selling Sunlight.

    Giada: Your character did something BAD, and as a result has been forced to lose their identity and wear a mask.

    We want players to truly immerse themselves in this world, but this would have required countless customization options. By having a faceless character, everyone can decide what’s behind the mask! This also makes you no ordinary merchant, but a MYSTERIOUS RASCAL. Non-player characters will also have a reason to be curious about you, making interactions more natural.


The world in Selling Sunlight is stuck – the planet itself used to turn, but no longer does. What kind of design and story opportunities does this offer you?

    Giada: The planet stopped turning only 300 years ago, so people are still getting accustomed to the changes. Different communities now share a very tight habitable space, and they sort of tolerate each other, but old grudges are still very much alive. There’s also a religious crisis ongoing, because the Sun was once considered a God.
    Someone believes that the Earth fell in love with the Sun, and now can’t stop looking at him. Others just think that the Sun is trying to burn everyone.

    Chiara: Besides the storytelling options, a still world has an undeniably charming atmosphere: everything is suspended between darkness and light, nothing is clearly defined and everything is mysterious. Exactly like our stories and our characters.


What inspired the watercolour art style?

    Anita (character designer): We decided to do what we’re best at: traditional drawing. The whole project is based on the feeling we could make an awesome product without fancy materials or shiny graphics. Of all the choices we had, watercolours happened to perfectly fit the mood we wanted for the game, as well as being our first choice in traditional colouring.

    Chiara: I admit watercolors aren’t my favourite medium, but as Anita said they perfectly fit our game’s atmosphere. Background after background, I’m starting to appreciate their versatility. Trying to get the lighting just right in every picture is proving to be especially difficult and exciting.


You’ve chosen a combatless experience in this game – what inspired that choice?
    Anita: The game we wanted to make had to be relaxing, yet challenging. Also, it seems like fighting is almost your only choice when it comes to RPGs: we’re so used to get out of every uncomfortable situation by drawing a sword! How about something different, once in a while?



Don't forget to follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sellingsunlight) (@sellingsunlight) for more regular updates!

"...the end."
"That's it? That story had no moral, what was the point?"
"Stories don't need a moral to have meaning."
"Ah, there it is."
@ASmallFiction (https://twitter.com/ASmallFiction)
- - -

Works of fiction need to have a meaning. This is especially true for a game like Selling Sunlight, which doesn't have a strong overarching plot but lots of small intersecting storylines. Having a central theme helps with keeping the tone consistent, making the narrative more coherent and compelling.
Finding your game's theme means answering the most difficult question:
what is the game exactly about?

“BEES EVERYWHERE” is usually a good answer when in doubt, but this proved not to be the case.
Regrettably.


When Selling Sunlight was still "unnamed merchant simulator RPG" I tought our main theme was "the value of things".
How much is a man's life worth? How much are you willing to sacrifice for business?


Working on the main storylines, I realized the game we were making wasn't really about money: we were using bartering as a way to connect with people - as an excuse for befriending other merchants and getting dragged into their personal storylines.
The main character is an outcast, forced to a life of never-ending wanderings. But by traveling, they can touch the lives of those who usually stand still, bringing a new point of view to people in need of a change.
Because in a word that stands still, you will have to move forward.
This is our new main theme.


Until next time, may the Sun shine on your path.
Hope you won't get burned.

You had me at "rpg with no combat and too many words." (Since my game is the same.) And at the bright colors and monsterish characters.

Cool style and world! Looking forward to it. We need more games with no combat.  ;D

Nice art, cool idea. Why can you be a plant when you can't be anything resembling dark skinned?

Thank you!  :gentleman:

I was just updating the image with some darker tones, try reloading the devlog!  :) I think we've got a nice variety of tones now, but would love to receive some additional feedback.

Hello!
During the last two months of development we have consolidated our team, saying goodbye to some occasional helpers and welcoming two paid freelancers that will be capable of giving more time and energy to the project. They are both incredible artists and have been working wonders! Let me introduce them to you.
 
ART
Lucy Kyriakidou (http://www.lucydoesart.co.uk/) is the artist now in charge of our character sprites. She somehow managed to translate our ramblings about elegance and Art Nouveau into this:


She can also make people move. Pure wizardry, I tell you.


Since her sprites are more wiry than our temporary assets, we decided to slightly enlarge all our backgrounds to avoid shrinking her art.
Combining everything together, we got this - and we’re all damn happy with the result.


MUSIC
We knew we needed a composer well-accustomed to strangeness for this game, and a name immediately sprang to mind: Devin Dilbert, composer of award-winning indie game Glitchhikers. We believe he’s very good, but judge by yourself: you can listen to his tracks - and buy them - on his Bandcamp page (https://thebluesun.bandcamp.com/music).


You’ll be able to hear one of Devin’s new tracks in the trailer we’re putting together! We’ll show it to you soon. Until then, may the Sun shine on your Path.

Just passing to drop a trailer  :gentleman:


We also have set a date for our first demo! You can expect it this September!

Chiara, our background artist, has finished painting the world map.
It's almost taller than her.


In Selling Sunlight you're not an adventurer, but a merchant: exploration is not focused on discovering new places, but on deepening your knowledge of the routes you spend your life traversing.


Some of the random events that happens while you travel are about discovering new locations, like a lake, a cave full of crystals or a small village. By putting a mark on the map, you will be able to revisit that place, slowly filling your usual travel routes with interesting spots only you know about.


Scanning the word map was also a good occasion to finish a dreadful task we’ve been putting off for too long: post-processing all the other backgrounds.
All our backgrounds are drawn on individual pieces of paper, so transforming them into actual maps you can walk on requires a fair bit of Photoshop wizardry.
First we make the collision maps, which are pictures that tell our engine where the characters can walk. To make one, we simply need to paint all the impassable areas red.


Then we cut all the elements you can walk behind, like columns, tables etc. and save them in a separate level.
By mixing those three layers together (base layer, collision map, overlay level) we get a playable map you can explore.

Hello, radiant and luminous people! We’re here to announce you a big scary exciting news: we’ll launch a Kickstarter campaign for Selling Sunlight in a month! The 19th September, to be precise.
 
Selling Sunlight started as an one-girl diversion from a boring office job, but the scale of the project has grown as more talented people have become involved. Our Kickstarter goal would allow us to focus full-time on the game, and release it to you even sooner. It would also help us to fairly pay more awesome people to help us make the game extra pretty, strange and cheerfully gloomy.
 
We’re still working on the various rewards, and that’s why we need YOU: take this survey (https://goo.gl/forms/KhSv4N5BBUrwkm2A2)! Tell us stuff! It won’t take more than 5 minutes of your time, we swear. Help us give you something nice in exchange for your support.
 
We’re now squashing the last bugs of our shiny demo, which we’ll release to you all before the Kickstarter. We’ve getting so much stuff done lately!
Look at all the things we did in those past three months (click on the screens to enlarge):

• Increased base resolution and resized all the assets accordingly. Prettiness got increased by 75%!
• Shiny new UI.
• Started working with Lucy, a talented freelancer who’s now taking care of all our character sprites.

• Replaced ugly standard assets with our hand-painted world map.

• The bartering interface now finally makes sense.
• You can now finally buy stuff! (No selling at the moment, though. That’s very hard to program.)

     

Expect a link for the demo in 2-3 weeks, along with an early peek at our Kickstarter page.

Until then, may the Sun shine on your path.

Hello, radiant and luminous people!
 

Keep in mind that this is a pre-alpha release - there are bugs, everything lacks polish, and most importantly, the demo is very linear. We decided to make a short linear story so you could experience a bit of everything without getting lost: in the complete game, you will be able to move between different cities and storylines as you wish.
Think of it as "an ordinary day in the world of Selling Sunlight".

You can also see a preview of our Kickstarter page here (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosebelle/1323542761?ref=334538&token=4c72184e). Mind giving it a look and telling us if everything is clear? We'd really appreciate some feedback. You can leave a comment here or directly on the page, if you prefer.  :gentleman:

I found this through your RPGMaker thread on Twitter which was really interesting. I'll download the demo and try it out once I get back on WiFi and not a mobile hotspot.  :gomez:

Thanks! I hope you'll enjoy it  :gentleman:

I have downloaded the demo, but I found it a bit disappointing  :-X
If you will improve the game I suggest you to release a second demo to show all the changes  :shrug2: Because I would never buy it after playing this demo.
However, you are only at the begin of develipling of the game  ;) I hope to see progresses.

Good luck  :wizard:

Looking great. Loving the character designs and water colour kinda style.

Hello, radiant and luminous friends!
We just launched our Kickstarter campaign. We don’t really know what to say about this apart from "AAAAAAAH".


Please consider backing us if you:

• Want to enjoy a relaxing game.
• Hold a grudge against the Sun.
• Like words and bees and watercolors.

Spread the word! Tell your friends!
Remember that if you’re still feeling unsure about what we’re about, you can try out our demo (https://itch.io/game/keys/157401) first.

Thanks for your support, and may the Sun always shine on your path.

KICKSTARTER UPDATE #1

Hello! Here is our first post-Kickstarter monthly update.


This month we mostly had to focus on boring post-Kickstarter stuff (bureaucracy, money, talking with contractors, planning for the future etc.), though we also found the time to start polishing the gameplay according to all the feedback we received so far.

GAMEPLAY
Between the Kickstarter and the games conventions we attended (AdventureX and the Milan Games Week), we got quite a bit of feedback on the demo to evaluate!


Overall, players seemed to enjoy the art and the story, but found the UI, and our bartering system in particular, a bit confusing.
That's why this November we focused on:

• Performance improvements: a few users reported lag on older devices, especially while streaming. We took the time to polish and optimize our code, hopefully improving performance for everyone.
• UI improvements: we're adding more visual clues to the bartering system, so it will be easier to understand whether a skill fails and/or offers change. We also added some new skills, like the ability to offer goods and favors to merchants for a discount.

• Overworld map: the overworld map got some much-needed love. Now random events can trigger while you travel, and there's a primitive weather system in place. It's still the ugliest-looking part of our game, and we know it. Better icons and UI will come next.

ART

Assets production is proceeding smoothly.
Lucy (https://twitter.com/lucyrawrs) made people sit:


Meanwhile, Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaKajika) designed the remaining merchants for the Yellow and the Green cities.
Here is a sneak peek:

That's all folks.
Have a radiant Christmas and a luminous New Year!

Forgot to paste the KS update here because every time I have to adapt the BBcode I die a little inside, sorry  :nono: and Gamejolt's custom code is even worse, uugh.

KICKSTARTER UPDATE #2
An anecdote: the traveling system is the first thing we ever programmed, before Selling Sunlight even had a name. And yet we keep tinkering with it, because story and gameplay intertwine in unforeseen ways.


GAMEPLAY
You see, a game about merchants supposedly has to have some time management mechanics - goods to deliver on time, rotating stocks, seasonal events etc. But would people living in a tidally-locked world really care about dates? Would they even perceive the passing of time in the same way as we?
After much mumbling and reading (we especially liked this article (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/seasonal-affective-disorder-mosaic/519495/) about winter blues) we established the people of Selling Sunlight don't have the notion of cyclic time. No repeating weeks, months or years: life for them is just a placid, never-ending afternoon.
We doubt people living in such conditions would be rigid about schedules. The time management elements will be there, but they won't be too stressful - no rigid deadlines, but a simple "the faster you can deliver the goods, the better".
With this concept in mind, we tweaked the map system to help you keep track of time and plan your journeys accordingly.
Now, instead of directly controlling the cart, you draw a path first. The cart will follow it automatically, stopping only once you reach a location or trigger a random event.


We're carefully enthusiastic about this new system and can't wait to get it tested. KS backers will get to try it in our Shiny New Demo (ETA: March 2018).

ART
Chiara (https://twitter.com/Cornopardo) painted some generic backgrounds to use during the random events, like a grassy field, a forest, a mountain etc. She also made scenario elements like trees, mushrooms and... Rocks.
Not very exciting, I know, but we need this stuff.


Meanwhile, Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics) worked on the look of the Golden Saints - priests who devoted themselves to the Sun so completely they became beings of pure light.
(In case you're wondering yes, one of them will be romanceable. Can you even smooch photons? Who knows?)


Lucy (https://twitter.com/lucyrawrs) worked on minor NPCs. They won't have portraits nor storylines, but will simply hang around to make cities feel more lively.


STORY
We got the main storyline down - your Holy Pilgrimage to persuade some Very Important Priests that you are repentant and would like to get your mask off, pretty please.
What we're doing now is a rather tedious work of skeleton-building: using placeholder dialogues, we program the quests so the steps will trigger correctly and there will be no ways of breaking sequence. As you can imagine, this involves testing, testing and more testing.
After making sure a quest flows correctly, we fill its skeleton with meaty words. But for now, it's mostly bones and suffering.

KICKSTARTER UPDATE #3

We're alive! Busy but alive!
Sorry for the late update; next one should arrive in the first week of the month, as usual.

ART
You may have noticed we haven't posted new screenshots in a while. That's because we were waiting for the new scanner to arrive before scanning the new backgrounds.



Chiara has been taking photos, though. Click to follow her on Instagram, if you like!​
Watercolors are a capricious medium: the resulting images are very delicate, and strong lights - like the bright, yellow one of a cheap scanner - may distort the colors or straight up delete the more delicate tones.
Thanks to your generosity, though, we were finally able to afford a professional scanner. It arrived early this February, and we immediately ran some tests:


​
Look at the sky! Colors are way less saturated, and everything looks more detailed and natural-looking. This is a very good starting point.
We're now in the process of rescanning every single graphical asset, adjusting the colors and putting everything in the game. This will take a while, but the final result will be prettier than ever.

EVENTS
Would you like to watch our artists paint? We've getting organized to film our painting process, and we're thinking of doing some live steams as well.
Do you think it's a good idea? Let us know in the comments!



GAMEPLAY&STORY
Ursula Le Guin passed away this January. She was a big influence for us, and will be dearly missed.
Go read her novels, if you haven't already. The Earthsea cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are just some of her most notable titles.

​
Anyway, Giada (https://twitter.com/Brica6rac) finished screaming at the new map system and moved on, focusing on quest programming. The tutorial mission is now playable from start to end, and we got some basic quests working as well.
It's exciting to see the game slowly come together, becoming a real world you can explore. There isn't much to do for now, but being able to freely move from city to city without crashes already feels like a victory.
Now it's finally time to flesh this world with some words.

That's all for now. May the Sun always shine on your path!                
          

Hello friends!
Monthly update. Exciting stuff.

ART
In February we finally bought a professional scanner, and this week we finally finished re-scanning every single graphical asset. We now need to digitally cut, retouch and resize the improved scans before putting them in the game. It's taking more time than expected, but it's a smooth process.

Meanwhile, Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/) started working on this square. Once she paints it, Yellow Beehive (the starting city) will finally be complete. The city of Green Hamlet is also almost done, only missing its church-greenhouse.
Orange War Machine will come next: a community of fiery outcasts living in the mechanical bowels of a ruined, gargantuan tank.
Chiara also tried recording her painting process, and the results are good. We hope to put some videos online in a month or two.

GAMEPLAY
You can now invite other travelers to eat together and chitchat.
Sustaining a conversation can be tricky when you're a masked individual unable to reveal anything about yourself. By completing quests and events, though, you will obtain Stories: a special category of items that can't be bought or sold.
Offer stories during meals to unlock conversations, learn more about your friends and get new business opportunities.


This conversation system was the last minor gameplay feature we wanted to add to the game. Now we can fully focus on polish, squashing bugs and adding content.

UI
After many months, the game got a proper menu screen! It still needs graphical polish, but we're getting there.


Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics) is currently giving all the other menus and UI screens another pass, trying to nail the difficult equilibrium between "being very art nouveau" and "being actually readable".

DEMO
As you may recall, during our campaign we promised to release a new demo for Peddler backers (15+ €) around March. So how's the situation?
The game is currently in a playable state, although there isn't much to do at the moment. You can visit the cities, chat with other characters and buy goods, but we still have so many quests to add!
Still, we'd like to put the game in your hands as soon as possible. You've given us an awful lot of faith and support so far, and we think it's important to let you check first-hand what the hell we have been doing.
We're aiming to finish the demo this month as promised, but we'll release it in early April - taking advantage of the situation to redo our website, bother the press and release new promotional material. We hope this small delay won't be an issue for you folks! We're a small team and we'd like to focus on one challenge at a time.
Making games is overwhelming. Releasing them is even more complicated.
We'll probably distribute the DRM-free version first, via Itch, because Steam requires us to compile a bunch of legal paperwork. We're also thinking of setting a communication channel that will be usable to both Steam and non-Steam users, like a Discord channel or a Reddit board. Start building a community.
Have a shiny weekend!

Quick update as we fill our luggage. We're heading to London for a very busy week.

EVENTS
Is Rezzed (https://www.egx.net/rezzed) too chaotic, costly and/or tiring for you? Come at  Bonus Stage instead!
We'll be exhibiting at Loading Bar, in Dalston (London) this Sunday with our friends from Tea-Powered Games (http://teapoweredgames.co.uk/) and many other cool indies. Check up the complete games lineup here (http://bonusstage.london/lineup-2018.html).
We'll bring our old Kickstarter demo and a ton of bee stickers to distribute. We'll also be wandering at Rezzed on Friday/Saturday, so do bother us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sellingsunlight) if you wish to have a chat.

GRAPHICS
Lucy (https://twitter.com/lucyrawrs) has been making assorted idle animations for all our characters. They're pretty nice.


We also finally finished putting all the rescanned art assets into the game. The new scanner truly makes a difference!


We also scanned the new locations Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/) has been working on, populated the Green city with random NPCs and started working on the light effects.
Have some screens:


GAMEPLAY
Giada (https://twitter.com/Brica6rac) has been working on the items database. We now have a complete spreadsheet of all the items you can buy and sell in the game, complete with names, categories, prices, weights and descriptions.


STORY
Most merchants also have a name now.
Selling Sunlight is a game about how cultures shape people, so we put a lot of effort into giving everyone a meaningful name.
Instead of using real names, we studied names from different cultures and tried to isolate what makes a name "feel" French, Japanese or Italian: recurring sounds, combinations of letters, rhythm, length. We then tried to match each of our fictional populations with the feeling we wanted to evoke.
The inhabitants of the Golden Beehive, for example, are a noble and elegant population descending from ancient warlords. To accentuate the dissonance between their bloody past and their baroque, shining present, we gave them short and harsh-sounding names full of Hs and Vs. We also gave them patronymics: a vestige of their old organizational structure based on warrior clans.
Strange-sounding names might be difficult for players to remember. That's why we also made sure to give every character a definite role (The Heiress, the Grocer, the Bard) and to always pair roles and names for easier memorization.

That's all for now! Hope to see you in London.
May the Sun always shine on your path.

Newly scanned art is looking great!

Thank you!
Cutting all the portraits art again was a huge pain, but the result is worth the effort.
Old bad HP scanner = never again.

This looks terrific!

Getting KS updates on this game is always such a treat

Hey guys this is truly awesome!

I'd have supported you had I known about it sooner.

I hope all goes well, and you can keep the deadline. My guesses are that it will be hard to - I wouldn't have promised such a short deadline if I were you, however! I don't know anything about the game so what do I know.

I do know I will buy it once it comes out.

Best of luck to you all.

Sam Louix

Monthly update!

April has been a slow month; Bonus Stage (http://bonusstage.london/) has been a wonderful, but time-consuming experience, and we returned home with a devastating post-conference flu that knocked out the team for a whole week.
Nevertheless, we managed to make some progress:

ART
Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/) finished the Greenhouse, the last location of the Green City.
We imagined the greenhouse like a long corridor full of plants. Chiara painted all the layers on different sheets of paper, which will scroll together to give an illusion of depth. It's the first time we experiment with parallax effects! Can't wait to put all the pieces together.


Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics) made some turnarounds. You won't see those in the game, but Lucy (https://twitter.com/lucyrawrs) is using them as a guideline to make the character sprites:


STORY
We reviewed together where the main storyline was going, and finally fixed a minor, long-standing issue that was bugging us: the two main concepts— you being a merchant, and the pilgrimage to obtain the Sun's pardon— weren't quite meshing together.
The solution?
The pilgrimage is still there, but you're not simply going to plead the Sun.
You are going to barter with the Sun to get your face back.

Monthly update!

Hello!
Latest news:

ART
Chiara has been working on a brand new location, the Orange War Machine. This city has been built inside a gargantuan, abandoned war tank.


"But wasn't this supposed to be a game without VIOLENCE?" asked Chiara's mom, all worried.

She finished the splash screen and is now working on the single locations inside the tank. Here is a sneak peek:


Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics) has been working on the generic NPCs inhabiting this place. They are distant cousins of the Green City citizens, but look rougher, tougher and prouder.



GAMEPLAY
We're proud to announce that you can finally sell goods in Selling Sunlight. It only took us two years of development.
Thanks to our new shiny selling screen, you will be able to select multiple items and sell them in bulk.


Giada (https://twitter.com/Brica6rac) is getting a much-needed holiday in July, so our next devlog will arrive a week later than usual. We apologize for the delay.

Enjoy the summer, and may the Sun NOT shine on your path! It's so hot. Please send us ice cream.

We're back from holidays! Have a late update!
ART
Only one background left, and the Orange City will be done! All the backgrounds painted so far has been scanned, cut and put into the game. Now we only need to add the light effects.


Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/) took a pause from the Orange City to focus on our new title screen.
Do you like it?


Meanwhile, Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics) has been working on a new character. She's a wanderer, an archaeologist, and she has a secret...


STORY
It's always so difficult to talk about the writing without telling too much.
Giada (https://twitter.com/Brica6rac) wrote some words. Are they good words? HOPEFULLY SO. What are they about? WE CAN'T SAY. But we can give you some cryptic spoilers, perhaps. tell you she wrote about light bulbs, a broken sceptre, a talking tree, and a king lurking behind mirrors.
Also, bees.


#LOVEINDIES WEEK
Our delicious friends at Failbetter Games organized the #loveindies week (https://twitter.com/itshannahflynn/status/1014153192425316352), an occasion to spread the word about your favourite indie games!


We invite you to rate, review and recommend your favourite indie games, and to check the #loveindies (https://twitter.com/search?q=%23loveindies&src=typd) hashtag on Twitter to discover new stuff to play <3
Until next time!
We'll post our next update around in the middle of August.

Hello! We are still alive, more or less. The heatwave in Italy has been unbearable, and we spent most of the month trying not to melt. Nevertheless, we armed ourselves with ice creams, fought the Sun, and managed to get some work done. Here's what we did:

ART
Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/) officially finished working on the Orange City backgrounds! Only two more cities to go and the backgrounds will be all done.
We really liked the way the greenhouse came out, so we decided to make another location that makes heavy use of parallax effects: it's a broken cannon where citizens of the Orange City illegally breed bees.


Meanwhile, Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics) painted a... Horse. Plant. Thing. Because it would have been boring to have a normal horse pull your cart, right?


We also did some work on the UI, with terrible results. Terrible, trust us.
Luckily, we did our taxes and ended up paying way less than expected, which means we managed to fulfil our dream of hiring a UI designer!
Potouto (https://work.potouto.com/) specializes in text-heavy games like visual novels, and already has some experience with art nouveau. We are super excited to work with them and can't wait to see how they will improve the game's interface!



GAMEPLAY
You can now ask questions to random NPCs in the streets. Like story NPCs, they can tell you information about assorted topics — but contrary to other merchants, they don't speak the local lingua franca, so conversations will be stilted and awkward.


You surely happened to help tourists who didn't speak your language: communication quickly devolves to frantic hand gestures and simple words being repeated multiple times.
We wanted you to feel like those tourists.
Next update will arrive at the end of September! May the Sun hopefully shine a bit less by then.

Hello friends!
Here's what we've been working on:

MUSIC
Our composer Devin Vibert (https://thebluesun.bandcamp.com/) sent us the theme song for the Orange City, and you can listen to it right now, HERE (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MMKp7AYjqjOR1o8lrzwzMzWQn4xjpxzE/view?usp=sharing).

Devin also made us some much-needed sound effects. They have been implemented into the game, and all the menus now bloops and bleeps in an appropriate and satisfying way.

ART
Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics) is working on the merchants that will populate the Orange City. She's currently in love with this NPC, the local artist weirdo:


Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/) started working on the penultimate city: the Teal Atheneum, where fishes are books and fishermen double as librarians.
Our pitch for this location was "a Chinese Venice". Here is a sneak peek:


GAMEPLAY
There's a reason we still haven't updated the alpha for high-tier backers: we are currently reviewing the bartering system, because it simply wasn't very fun.
We listened to your feedback and we researched other bartering systems, trying to find new ideas.
This article (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/23/games-trading/) by Sin Vega on Rock, Paper, Shotgun was a big inspiration. It made us understand money is usually the least interesting part about a trading deal, and gave us the idea to check tabletop RPG systems.
The updated bartering system retains the same core, but all the elements work a little differently.
The list of changes includes:

• Multiple currencies.
  
• Each merchant has a default patience level you can increase by befriending them. Grumpy merchants start with lower patience, thus adding some variety.
  
• Patience doesn't reset after every transaction, but at the end of the day. Makes merchants feel more human and limits exploits.
  
• A renewed focus on trading services and goods. You will be able to complete a transaction without using money, if you want.
  
• New skills during bartering now gets unlocked as you befriend the merchants. Gain their trust, and you will be able to unlock risky prepositions like "give me a discount and I will search for this item and bring it to you".

Many of those skills require creating new systems from scratch, and that's why they're taking more time than expected.
Game development is hard. We hope the result will dazzle you.


BACK NIGHTHAWKS!
Do you like narrative games? And vampires? If so, please support Nighthawks (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/753131002/nighthawks-the-vampire-rpg-0)!
There is only one day left to back this snazzy RPG by some of the finest games writers  we know. If you are still waiting for a sequel to Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, this one is for you.


Have a shiny and luminous day!

Holy carp, every update I see to this post makes me want this game more. It looks beautiful and I love all the plot hints and ideas.

Thank you, good person  :gentleman:


Monthly update: THERE IS NO UPDATE. OH NOES.

Last month has been a whirlwind of medical issues, assorted troubles and country-wide floods (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/venice-italy-underwater-as-city-hit-by-worst-flooding-in-a-decade/). We are good now, but we hadn't done much apart from coding and admin work.

So no fancy screens this time. Apologies! We do, however, have one thing to show you. Remember when Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/) was trying to set up a camera stand to record her painting process?

Mission accomplished.

https://youtu.be/c6Y_MISJ9eA

We're now back on track and development is continuing as usual. We shall hopefully bring you better news next month!

Until then, may the Sun always shine on your path.

Hello! Time for an update!
We spent most of the Christmas break recoiling for 2018 and planning for the new year (*waves fist at Steam bureaucracy*), but we also worked on something new to show you: a preview of our shiny new UI!
It’s SO EXTRA. WE ARE VERY EXCITED.
Let us ramble a bit about the design process before the big reveal.

UI TROUBLES
Our old UI had been cobbled together by Giada (https://twitter.com/Brica6rac) and embellished by Tobias Cook (https://twitter.com/tghcook) from Failbetter Games (http://www.failbettergames.com/), who helped Giada a little when she was incubating at the studio. The result wasn’t bad, but it was a single pretty window we recycled everywhere: we had no clear design principles in mind to help us design the rest. We're comic artists, after all, not graphic designers.


Tobias is the artist in charge of Sunless Skies (https://store.steampowered.com/app/596970/SUNLESS_SKIES/)'UI, by the way, and he wrote a great Gamasutra blog (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TobiasCook/20181219/333259/Reading_by_Gaslight_A_look_inside_Sunless_Skies_UI_redesign.php) about his creative process! The guy knows what he's doing.
But since kidnapping him proved to be unfeasible, we had to think of another solution.

THE HELPER
After many failed experiments, we decided to hire Kathaeris (http://kathaeris.com/) to redo the whole UI from scratch.
Bringing a new person on a project is always a delicate affair. To get a good result, it's essential to write design documents to make sure everyone is on the same line.
That’s when Giada (https://twitter.com/Brica6rac)’s experience in comics writing finally paid off. Writing a design document, she realized, is not so different from writing a comics script: in both cases, you are trying to convey through words how an image should look and feel. It requires you to be very practical and very abstract at the same time, to sketch storyboards and to gather visual references.


The concept we wanted to convey through the UI, we decided, was a mirror framed with gold. Mirrors are important in the lore of Selling Sunlight, and blue message windows would help the text stand out in our warmly-colored maps. We also asked our UI artist to add circular elements, both to represent the Sun and as a callback to classical Art Nouveau posters.
After studying the design documents, Kathaeris sent us some sketches:


We had to make sure the new window was roughly as big as the old one, or else all the line breaks in the dialogues would get broken! After testing everything in-game, we opted for option 1 and let Kathaeris do their magic.


We can't wait to get the rest of the UI, take new pretty screens and finally open our Steam page.
Have a shiny and luminous day!

wow, this is beautiful work! I love the lore of your world, looks like there are a lot of whimsical details to be uncovered. good luck on your game :D

Thank you!  :gentleman:
We worked hard on finding the right equilibrium with the lore: we wanted our world to feel alien, but we also wanted players to care about the people living there.
The trick to get this right, I think, is to set one or two clear principles and to make the rest of the lore revolve around them.
The main principle of Selling Sunlight is "fire = good". The religion revolves around the Sun! Magic is fire-based! Change is good, because flames are ever-changing!

We hope once players internalize this rule, they will be able to navigate our world like a true local.
We want them to meet an ice wizard and immediately think "mhh, iffy", without the need for us to spell it outright - because if fire = good, everything related to stasis and coldness will make them suspicious.
I hope my ramblings make sense!

Hello!
In an improbable turn of events, our art team members (Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics), Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/) and Lucy) (https://twitter.com/lucyrawrs) all moved to different cities, and for completely unrelated reasons, between January and February. They have been quite busy, so no fancy drawings to show you today: this time, we bring you menu screens. EXCITING MENU SCREENS.

UI
After messing around with the concept Kathaeris (http://kathaeris.com/) made for us, we realized we needed a person who could handle UX design as well as UI — in other words, a person capable of both designing a menu screen and of making it pretty. Selling Sunlight is not a numbers-heavy RPG, but it features a number of unusual elements, like the different attitudes, that needs to be displayed in an intuitive way.
New entry Joe Neeves (https://twitter.com/Limonium_Art) took over UI/UX duties. His first step was to elaborate the message window we showed you last month, adding the name box and the friendship/attitude icons.
Here are his initial sketches:


Menus exist to support gameplay. And since Selling Sunlight is "talking with people: the game", the dialog window has been the main focus of our rework.
How to clearly identify who's speaking when there are multiple characters on screen? Who are you going to influence with your choices? A message box may look deceptively simple to design, but there's so much to take into account.


Joe even had the courage to tackle the bartering screen. You know, the one that previously looked like this:


And that now looks like this:


Meanwhile, Giada (https://twitter.com/Brica6rac) spent most of her time writing documentation, working with Joe and battling against two-years-old code to implement the new UI. RIP.

Have a shiny and luminous day. ☀️

Hello! Time for our monthly update.
Art
As you may remember from our past devlog, all members of our art team (Anita (https://twitter.com/AnitaComics), Lucy (https://twitter.com/lucyrawrs) and Chiara (https://www.instagram.com/chiaraboscaro/)) recently relocated to different cities. Now everyone is back at work, but this change created a challenge: Anita and Chiara now live 100kms apart.
Anita is our character artist. Chiara does backgrounds. But she's also the Sacred Guardian of the Scanner We Bought With the Kickstarter Money, and she has to scan Anita's drawings as well.
We decided against using snail mail, because watercolor paper is delicate and our past experiences as Etsy sellers taught us the mail should not be trusted. Cue a long, long journey to finally meet at some shady train station to exchange suitcases while feeling like drug dealers.


At least Lucy works digitally, so can just plop all her sprites in a shared folder. She's currently finishing all the sprites for the Green and the Yellow City, finally giving a body to some familiar faces you've seen in the demo:


Joe (https://twitter.com/Limonium_Art), our UI artist, recently got a full-time job and he had to relocate as well. We are starting to think all our art positions are cursed, like the Defense Against Dark Arts teachers of Hogwarts. On the other hand hey, if you have been postponing your relocation attempts for years, consider joining our team.
Only a few menus remain and Joe remains determined in finishing them, albeit slowly. He's currently tackling all the main menu pages, like the quest journal and the items screen:


Writing
We started brainstorming about the Blue Quarry, the last of the five main locations that will be available in the game (the Red Temple, unlocked in a sketch goal, will later appear as a DLC).
The many populations of Selling Sunlight have their own, wholly fictional customs, but share visual similarities with real-world cultures. When Selling Sunlight was born, we mixed and matched different skin colors, costumes and languages from our world to create interesting combinations. Our goal was to create fictional cultures that feel new, interesting and fantastic, but without alienating the players.
 The player character is not an alien visitor, but a person who has always lived in this world. To make the players feel the same way, we tried to fill the world with a sense of familiarity.


Even though our cultures are fictional, it's important for us to avoid trite tropes that reinforce negative stereotypes. In our first drafts, the Quarry was described as "Ancient Rome + Moria". The people of the Quarry are dark skinned, grumpy isolationists who live in a mountain and reject magic in favor of science.
We took a step back and realized we were basically making Drows 2.0.
Drows are kinda racists. Let's not do that.


 We're taking steps to make this location less trite without having to radically rewrite all our lore. One simple change we decided to make is to not place the city inside a mountain, but above it. The hollow crater of an inactive volcano is a much cooler location, and better fits the technological background of our fictional city. GEOTHERMAL ENERGY, HELL YEAH.

The Indigo Quarry will pose great challenges, both from a writing and a visual standpoint. But we are determined in getting it right, and we know we can count on your feedback <3
Until next time!
The team

Hello!
The sun hasn't been particularly kind to us lately, but we remain determined to finish this game.


June has mostly been a "putting the pieces together" month. The good news is that we're finally really, really close to releasing a new beta build to backers who pledged 15€ or more. The bad news is that we don't have many fancy screens to show you today, since we spent most of our time squishing bugs and updating old code. In particular, we gave our dialogue system a big upgrade!
Let us show you how it works.

Making games talk
Truth is, there aren't many efficient ways to handle branching dialogues in videogames. Spreadsheets are the most commonly used solutions, because it's easy to export data from a spreadsheet to whatever game engine you're using.


For Selling Sunlight, we created our own dialogue system from scratch, focusing on two important features:

• Ability to store text in simple text files
  
• Ability to program cutscenes from the text

Selling Sunlight has a sprawling, modular structure, more akin to an open-world game than to a linear JRPG. Some quests require you to do different activities, like asking questions, buying stuff and traveling to certain places. Other quests can be completed in different ways, or have different endings depending on your attitude. Organizing all this text can get quite messy!
We designed a system that allows us to write special commands like "show this picture", or "give the player this item", directly in the dialog files. This way we can program entire cutscenes without even having to open our game engine.


This dialog system is the backbone of the whole project, and we keep updating it from time to time to streamline it and add useful features.
Our old message UI, for example, didn't feature name boxes. Our new UI has space to show names, so we updated the dialog system to allow it to automatically retrieve and display the names of people involved in a conversation.
Programming all this might not sound exciting, but having a solid base means we can spend more time writing quality dialogues, and less time fiddling with code to put the dialogues in the game!

That's all for now.
May the Sun stop shining before our laptops melt ;_;