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[Sacha Holsnyder (Appeau Studio)]

Hullo!

First, thank you AlexGK for your suggestions! We'll be trying to mixi and match different influences

Now here are two little updates.

1) We've been working on our shield spell animation! The spell Zoe casts in order to protect her beloved. Each orb represents a hit that would be absorbed, at which point the orb would break.



2) We've been experimenting with logos to find the right one.




Please feel free to tell us your opinion on these, any input is appreciated!

[Sacha Holsnyder (Appeau Studio)]

Hi!
Here's a little glimpse of the work process our artists use for animations! :D I'm very proud to be working with them  :')

1- A quick HD sketch of the animation to establish the movement
2- Clean it up to get close as close as possible to the desired visual
3 - Resize the animation so it fits the resolution of our game
4 - Draw again over each frame to have a clear animation!
It seems like a long process, but it's actually rather time-saving and allows for clean pixelart animations.





But sometimes they are not working and producing fan art instead. Still pretty cool, so they're forgiven Here are 2 of these, with Zoe, one of our two protagonists, as a subject.

[Sacha Holsnyder (Appeau Studio)]

Hi! We're necroposting our own topic ! /o/
We've realized we have been neglecting TIGSource. And perhaps we have gone into the world talking about Albert+Zoé a bit too soon, as we needed more time to actually bring the concept to maturity. Now we are closer to this. And we're back here for weekly-ish devlog posts :D

So, first, a giant gameplay update. In all previous posts, you can see we used the classic "bullet thingies that show when to tap" technique. But the UI wasn't right, we couldn't find where to put the bullet lanes. There have been experiments, science was done, but nothing satisfying came up.

So one day the sound designer goes: "Shall we remove the UI?"
The others go: WWWWHHAT!!!!!
But bear with us.

It is a bold thought. One we had at the very beginning of the project but quickly discarded as impossible, impratcical and unplayable. But now Albert+Zoé might be ready for it... "Oh my God how the hell am I going to play that !?" do you ask? Well. Every spell or attack matches a rhythmic pattern, common across all rhythmic levels, and we were already working with that in mind when there were bullets. So now, you just have to perform the rhythmic pattern of the spell you want to cast in order to cast it. And you can cast it at any time, as long as you do it in rhythm. Also, you can chain rhythms! The end of a spell can be the beginning of another... And that's a whole combo playfield we can't wait for you to try out!
Here are mockups of the new UI, which represents the available spells-rhythms, and shows the rhythm you're tapping.



This new gameplay is part of why we stopped posting. It was a huge change we had to deal with and it broke almost everything.

Secondly, the team has grown Appeau Studio now has a narrative designer, Bettina, and a developer, Marc! Their arrivals gave huge boosts to their respective fields in the game. Which means we're getting MUCH closer to a playable demo, and are bettering and expanding our lore and sprawling narrative!


These changes made our summer a very exciting time. The team has a very fun dynamic, we solved a lot of the problems of non-fun gameplay that were bothering us, and Albert+Zoé is starting to look like what we envisioned when we started it and that's an awesome feeling <3

[[ - Null - ]]

Holy, a huge update!

First of all, thanks for keeping up the updates, is a great new (at least to me) to read that. Now, with the new update in the UI:
I think your best bet would be making simple large buttons (scaled with the size of the screen) at every side of the screen representing the characters that can be tapped in the screen (if is a touchscreen game) or with user-defined keys (like X and V), and they should beat at the rythm of the song. If you want to make a combo with Zoe just tap at the rythm in certain moments, but instead of having a panel like the one you guys showed would be better (in my opinion) to keep that hidden and the combos can be seen in a special pause menu with a simple testing mode, just like the songs in the TLoZ Ocarine of Time.
I think that would be the best way to keep the screen clean so the players can focus more in the background and the song rather than the UI.

Just keep working on this, I can't wait to see the final product! 

[Devilkay]

as Alex said... it's too similart to  Hyper Light Drifter...

[Sacha Holsnyder (Appeau Studio)]

I think your best bet would be making simple large buttons (scaled with the size of the screen) at every side of the screen representing the characters that can be tapped in the screen (if is a touchscreen game) or with user-defined keys (like X and V), and they should beat at the rythm of the song. If you want to make a combo with Zoe just tap at the rythm in certain moments, but instead of having a panel like the one you guys showed would be better (in my opinion) to keep that hidden and the combos can be seen in a special pause menu with a simple testing mode, just like the songs in the TLoZ Ocarine of Time.

Thank you for your heartwarming enthusiasm, Null! :D We actually gave a lot of thought to the UI right after my post, and came to surprisingly identical conclusions to your own! A picture will be better than words, so here we go:



I guess it's pretty self-explanatory. With one added detail: each note length is associated with a color. That allows us to represent rhythms in short form with only colored bullets. This kind of view is used on the left of the input zone, and gives a tip on the following note in the spell. We'll probably also implement a way to view the available spells in full, in the way of a pause menu as you suggested (but not really with a pause, because rhythm game, gotta keep the flow flowing )

[Sacha Holsnyder (Appeau Studio)]

Hi!
Not exactly game dev news, but we're opening our Discord server! There are builds of the game and cool people. Come with us! https://discord.gg/52pkMaG

Apart from that, we're working on integrating the pretty UI from my previous post. It's there, but not animated yet. We also now have the ability to build for Android! Yay!!!

The main game design thought goes to designing, basically, our character Albert. Whereas Zoe has a spellbook with spells which are rhythms, Albert has only 3 very basic rhythms, and chaining them produces combos, in a manner similar to a versus fighting game. The more actions you chain, the better become Albert's attacks. But we still have to design these combos, and all the interactions between Albert and the adversary. What happens if you parry a boss's normal attack? What about if you counter a boss's powerful attack? etc.
So yeah, not much to report on that front, but it's the next step in our design process

Oh, and we are going for better presentations at conventions! We got a dedicated tablet for demoing the game, and our chief DIYer is building a two-buttons pad out of a mouse.

[ManuScythe]

This looks interesting, will keep an eye on it!

Do you guys have a Demo?

[Sacha Holsnyder (Appeau Studio)]

Thanks! Yes there is a demo, have a look inside the Discord I try to keep the important things bilingual (we're French, and looks like our community is French too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)