Update 112
Hey there!

This month haven't been productive for various personal reasons so we're still working on the village. Pierre has been working on the foxmen's burrows and it's slowly coming together. Have a quick look at some WIP tests:

Sorry if this doesn't fit on screen but I refuse to downscale pixel art.

I've also started polishing some things that we were not satisfied with, such as making black flames flash white then turn red while they chase the player around. We also made the enemy sprites flash white when hit for some extra impact. It's still a bit rough right now but we'll be sure to share some gifs later.

See you next month!

Cheers! 

Update 111
Hey there!

It's been a while! We're going to switch to monthly updates from now on.

After refactoring and making a number of improvements, we've started working on the next town, Ver Lanec, a foxman village that will replace the merchant clearing featured in the previous demo:

No new features are planned until we're done so get ready for a lot of level design.

See you next month!

Cheers!

Update 110

Hey there! Happy holidays!

We've been busy with patching the demo to fix a number of bugs found by players and also took some time off for the holidays.

We also hired a professional translator to help us localize the game in Japanese. Because the language is very different from those based on the latin alphabet, it took a while to get it working correctly and I had to fix text-related issues after releasing a first patch for the demo.

With the demo released and patched, we can resume working on the rest of the game in 2019!

See you next year!

Cheers! 

[Click here to fight trees!]

Update 109

Hey there!

It took longer than expected but the demo is finally here! It features a lot of cool stuff people seem to like having in their RPGs such as some story elements, a merchant and a boss at the end. We hope you will have fun!

   Click here to fight trees! 

We'd love to hear you thoughts on our game, so we made this handy (and short) survey. It takes less than 2 minutes (unless you have a lot to say) and really helps us!

We might not be able to resume weekly updates before 2018 but we'll certainly try to wrap up the year with another post.

See you later!

Cheers! 

oh, i saw it on indiexpo few time ago. Is it right? Good luck! The good thing is that you can played it onlinen :D rare for a good rpg!

Thanks! We do have a page on Indiexpo, and while we hardly post anything there, we'll definitely update the demo once it's ready. Making the game playable online was something important to us and one of the reasons we switched to Unity a while ago. I learned the hard way that a lot of people don't like having to download and extract a zip file to try a game. The finished game however, won't be playable in browser.

Update 108
Hey there!

The demo is almost ready for release! Unfortunately, I'm moving again this week so I'll be quite busy and won't have internet access for some time. If we finish the demo after Wednesday, I won't be able to upload the build until I get a new one. Sorry about that

See you next month!

Cheers!

Update 107
Hey there!

I have good news and bad news. The good news is the demo has been very kindly translated to Brazilian Portuguese by Ricardo Douglas, so be sure to tell your Brazilian friends about our game! The bad news is of course that the demo is not out yet.

Pierre and I have been working together on improving the treant sprite, which was too dark and not readable enough. It took a little longer than expected but we think it was worth some extra work:

         
Life's not always easy when you're a treant.

Pierre also made new item icons so those featured in the previous screenshots are already outdated. It took some time to find the right style for our game, but I think we're pretty much settled for now.

I will be presenting the game in public for the very first time next month at Tokyo Indies, which is a little scary but also very exciting!

See you next week!

Cheers!

yes good

Thanks!

Glad to see this coming together, I'm a huge fan of the breath of Fire 4-esque battle view. Looking forward to the demo 

Thank you, we hope you'll enjoy it!

Update 106
Hey there!

Bug fixing and polishing is coming along nicely, and the known bug list is almost empty! The game is now much smoother but, unfortunately, it's nothing very exciting to write about. I can't really risk introducing new bugs by adding features, so updates are going to be a bit bland on the code side until we release the demo. Which should happen pretty soon, hopefully.

I also worked on balancing the game witht the feedback from the previous demo, and I think we're getting somewhere. We still need a few more people to play it so I can get feedback on that.

Pierre made some nice looking cliffs so we can have something other than trees in the game. Still mostly trees though. I mean, the demo takes place in a forest, so there's always going to be a lot of greenery.

Don't worry, she's not hungover, she just jumped off a cliff.

Once we're done with the finishing touches, we can finally release the demo, so this should happen next week (unlikely) or by the end of the month (more likely).

See you next week!

Cheers! 

Update 105
Hey there! It's been quite a while!

We've both been busy with personal stuff, but the project still made a lot of progress nonetheless!

Enemies and cutscenes have been added to the game, which is now in a playable state. We still need to polish the demo before releasing and I guess I also have some bug fixing to do:

I must go, the forest needs me!

Joking aside, I worked on stabilizing the game and while it still needs some more testing, it's a lot more solid than previously.

We also added some polish to the game, mostly to the user interface: menus are a pretty important part of the experience in a JRPG, so we've decided to make them our number one priority. They're still work to do (especially in terms of animation) but we're getting ther bit by bit:

Oooh, shiny!

On the visual side, Pierre made lots of new assets and the game now looks way better. I'm probably certainly totally biased but I really think it's pretty good. But don't take my word and see the result for yourselves:

The clearing is getting more lively!

We hope to release the next demo very soon. See you next week!

Cheers!

Update 104
Hey there!

The new UI is mostly done! It still needs some polish, but the layout is more or less final and I think we've reached a point where we can share some screens with you:

The new character menu, without the ugly white background (WIP)


The improved equipment menu


The main merchant screen

Here's a higher resolution version of Marguerite's portrait:

Meet Marguerite, merchant extraordinaire.

Pierre is on a vacation so clean assets will have to wait for a week. I'll post a new update as soon as we have cool things to show.

See you soon!

Cheers!

Update 103
Hey there!

We're still working on the new UI. The generic symbols we were using for items category were not fancy enough, so we're now replacing them: each item has now its own icon! We also settled on a new font, Karen Bold. We'll need to edit it a little but it should make dialogues easier on the eyes.

Pierre is currently reworking menus so as to provide more information without using more space and give them a more cohesive feel. It's a lot of work but we're getting there!

A preview of the WIP merchant screen with the new font and icons


The pause menu screen (also a WIP)

We also remade the status screen to something more expressive. Now, for each character we display:

• The character's stats
• A short description with some backstory elements
• An artwork

This should help providing some context to the demo.

See you next week!

Cheers!

Update 102
Hey there! Long time no see!

After a break, we resumed our work on the game and made lots of small improvements and fixes.

Pierre made new props and we had to rethink how we handle sprites: it's now very simple to update a number of them in a single batch. I fixed some bugs and improved the sword attack on the map. We're also making sprites and writing dialogues for the NPCs of the demo:

Meet the old foxman!

More importantly, the long (and overdue) menu overhaul is on its way: no white backgrounds anymore! In addition to improving visuals, we're working on new features, such as items tabs, and new assets: character portraits, items sprites ans skill icons. We're also looking for a new font to replace Arpegius, the one we currently use. We're trying the cool-looking fonts at Pentacom.jp and hope to settle on a new one in the next few days.

See you next week!

Cheers!

Update 101
Hey there!

During the past two weeks, I built a first draft of each map featured in the demo, blocked all connections with other areas and removed unused maps. I also replaced the village map with a clearing containg a save point.

We also changed the game over system. Instead of loading the last save, which can be quite punishing, we decided to simply return the player to the last foxman statue visited with full HP and MP. Since this is a demo and there is no proper tutorial yet, Pierre and I thought it'd be better to make the game as forgiving as possible (for the moment).

I'm now polishing the level design and adding some more props and decorations such as flowers, trunks, etc. Here is a little preview of the new prop sprites:

Soon, the clearing will also contain some NPCs and a merchant. Speaking of which, here's some eye-candy (WIP):

Meet Marguerite, the main merchant of the game! She'll follow you throughout the game with here chariot, selling increasingly powerful items as the story unfolds.

See you in two three(?) weeks!

Cheers!  

Update 100
Hey there!

100 UPDATES ! We've been doing this for 6 years now!

A lot has been going on since the last demo. We set out to build an horizontal slice of the game, which helped us flesh out the game's world and story. We worked on the theme of each area and dungeon to make them feel unique. We rebuilt the combat system and wrote a complete first draft of the game's dialogues. We also figured out how to handle a large number of maps and created tools to help with the level building.

After all this, we decided to work toward a new demo of the Syl Brannvar forest, one of the early playable area, with a complete dungeon and the first town of the game. This proved more challenging than we thought and highlighted a number of weaknesses in our level building pipeline, especially with organic tilesets, like cliffs. Instead of compromising quality or pushing the demo back for a month or two, we decided to simply cut the town and cliffs from the next demo build.

Here's a little preview of what we have right now.

So, what's the plan ? We're working on an intermediate demo featuring the Syl Brannvar forest with improved visuals, the new combat system, merchants and a couple NPCs. The demo will focus on the new battle system and help us test the game loop (explore the dugeon, go back to the merchant, repeat until you reach the boss). We'll also add some story and lore elements to the game since a lot of people felt they were missing from the previous demo. This way, we should be able to release the game sometime in July. The first town of the game will have to wait the following demo.

Now time for some eye-candy!

Finally, I've been working on Blade of Verdance as my day job for some months now and I don't think I can continue. You've probably noticed that the game development have been slower for the past few weeks: that's because I've been looking for a new day job. Of course, I'll keep working on the game on my spare time.
Updates might be a little less substantial, but we should manage to get the demo out before I start working again.

See you next week!

Cheers! 

Update 99
Hey there!

After settling for 32 pixels tiles and polishing the tileset generator, I started working on a new level build tool. Until now, we had to place props such as bushes and flowers one by one, then run a script that made sure every single sprite in the scene had a pixel-perfect position. Yes, it was as slow and cumbersome as it sounds. But not anymore! I made a handy tool that allow us to "paint" objects on the map and it's both fast and furi fun. Behold:

Don't worry, the seams between tiles only appear in the editor

The painted objects are placed on an isometric grid and rely on collisions to avoid overlapping existing objects. I think it makes them look more natural than if they were placed on a straight grid.

The new tool does a bunch of cool things:

• Pick a random sprite in a set with weighted probabilities
• Flip sprites horizontally and/or vertically
• Batch undo support (revert strokes instead of removing elements one by one)

It can be configured in Unity using a custom editor window (with incredibly poorly named parameters).

I spent longer than expected on this, but It will be extremely useful in the long run.

In the meantime, Pierre has been working on replacing my placeholder tiles with better ones so the game is starting to look better!

See you next week!

Cheers!

Update 98
Hey there!

I made some progress on the level build and Blade of Verdance is starting to look like a video game again!

I started replacing the placeholder tiles with more detailed ones (still WIP) but it turns out the generated autotiles look very blocky:

This is because of how we combine tile quarters to create the corner tiles. I decided to make the tileset generator use hand-made corner tiles instead of generated ones, allowing us to make rounder corner, which works a lot better for dirt and grass tiles:

I tried switching back to 32*32 tiles and I sort of like the rounder, softer look. I think it would be better for dark grass tiles since it would allow us for more gradual transitions. (Pierre is away so all you get is ugly placeholder corner tiles)

I'll need some more tests with other tiles before deciding on the final tile size, then I'll start adding details to the forest maps.

See you on Sunday in two weeks!

Cheers!

Update 97
Hey there!

The roll back did not go well, the Unity Editor crashes when I try to open the recent versions of the project. Fortunately, earlier versions from two weeks ago seem to work so I think we'll be able to resume work on the level build.

While I was struggling with Unity, Pierre worked on the tiles I need to build the demo levels. I hope I'll be able to finish at least one map by the end of the week in order to have some screenshots to share next Sunday.

See you next week!

Cheers! 

Update 96
Hey there!

This week's update have been delayed again after I discovered that cutscenes system were not as reliable as I thought. After investigating, I decided to stop relying on Unity's Timeline system and write my own cutscene system from scratch.

I managed to finish implementing all I needed to play simple cutscenes and finally record a gif today. Behold!

Our current solution requires a good amount of hard-coding and doesn't support preview tools but at least it works all the time.

I was going to work on the level build after that but it turns out I made another mistake: I upgraded Unity and just found out a bug was introduced in the tile system that we rely on to build our levels, which is why it's usually recommended to not upgrade the framework you're working with during development. Anyway, it's rollback time.

See you on Sunday (I hope)!

Cheers ! 

Update 95
Hey there!

Last night's update was delayed because I thought I would be able to code a full working cutscene and record a gif by tonight. Unfortunately, things were a bit more complicated than expected, so the gif will have to wait until next time.

Once I can start making cutscenes, I'll start writing dialogues for the demo, so that the story makes sense even without the prologue. I'll also have to make some arrangements to introduce Erik, who is supposed to join the party later.

See you next week!

Cheers!

That's awesome. Well done! I am just going to drop you a message, hope you read it! Thanks

Sam

Thank you Sam! I just saw your message, sorry for the late answer!

One gif of your game was enough to convince me to play it

Thanks! The current demo is outdated, but we're working on a new one right now. I hope you'll like it!

Update 94
Hey there!

I've been making fixes and improvements to our level build tools after working on the village map. I also worked on small improvements to the game feel: new sounds here and there, smoothing visual transitions, etc. It's not much, but we believe it's important for the player experience.

Pierre and I also made a lot of progress on village interiors. We now have a core concept and a rough layout of each building.

Finally, after noticing we forgot to add an enemy with poison-based attacks, we decided to add a new one instead of changing those we already had.
...
..
.
And that's why there's now a fourth type of slime in the game :}
(Don't worry, it should be updated into a new type of monster later)

Ahem. Moving on, Pierre also overhauled the heal/save statue sprite:

We still need dozens and dozens of new assets, but improving this one was definitely a wise decision!

See you next week!

Cheers! 

This looks great, I'm a sucker for JRPGs I'll keep an eye on this, nice work! 

Thanks! I'll hope you'll like the gameplay as well!

If all of the game art is as incredible as that last piece you posted of the forest & fox type fellow this game will go far.

Thanks for the kind words!

Also, while BoF4 looks much better than the other games, in terms of gameplay BoF3 is probably the superior one - so for gameplay, check that out and look to BoF4 for the sprite stuff. Good luck!

While the visuals were heavily inspired by Bof4, the mechanics were inspired by several games such as the Shin Megami Tensei series and spin-offs, Etrian Odyssey, recent Final Fantasy games, etc. I think the game has a distinct feel when you play it, it's quite different from the BoF games.