Wow, it's really hard to keep a dev blog going when you are spending months working on "the boring stuff." (In this case, fixing bugs.) Looking back there is actually plenty to show, so here comes one big update!
In September I started the first round of beta testing. There were a couple of really active testers, but the rest of the test group let me down a bit, resulting in not as much information as I had hoped. Because of this lack of feedback, I let the testing period run for way longer than I should have.
In the meantime, I kept playing through the game myself and kept making huge to do lists of my own. Resulting in the addition of a new dungeon (The haunted house I showed earlier) and two new small villages. Here is the northern part of one of them:
It looks a bit empty, but that has to do with the story. By adding this village, I could add a plot point to the story that wasn't there before. It was one of those things that was canon in my mind but not actually shown to the player. Well, now it is!
The same goes for the optional dungeon. It provides a lot of backstory on one of the characters in the game that went completely untold before. I also pixeled a couple of dogs that have something to do with that:
Other than that, I made some (in my opinion) huge improvements to the "feel" of the game by adding a bunch of sounds and visual effects, and redesigned some dungeons and puzzles a bit to make them more fun and less of a chore. (Less backtracking, faster animatons, etc.)
I felt there was too little variety in battle themes, so I remade a lot of old Ludum Dare songs to fit in the game as battle themes. Here is one of them:
https://soundcloud.com/joep-aben/burning-rageAnd I think that's in big lines the fun stuff I've been doing the last couple of months. The rest was a whole lot of bug fixes and little alterations. Of course, there are some good moments there as well. Like when I found out I forgot to put a wall somewhere and was able to get to one of the swimmers in the middle of the swimming pool. He had something really random, and frankly very sad to say. Something I typed in about 4 years ago and totally forgot about:
That one had me rolling on the floor. What was I thinking putting that there as a placeholder text.
Anyway, those, and many more changes have been made, and I'm set for another round of testing. This time the testing period will be limited to just a month. If you would like to help me out with testing, let me know and I will get you a steam key!
Oh yeah, and for some more big news: I'm aiming for a
release in the second quarter of 2017, and we seem to be on schedule so far. I'm so excited!
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