DEVLOG XXVI - 2022 in ReviewMerry Christmas, TIGForums!
Anyone that's followed this devlog the last 16 months probably knows I tend to take a pessimistic outlook on my progression for this project, but I want to look back at this year and review what all was accomplished over the last 12 months, compared to my earlier devlogs in late 2021. Do I wish I was further along?
Absolutely. Did I hope to already have a Steam page & teaser trailer live? Yes. Did I hope to have a public alpha by this point? Yes. But, overall, I can't complain about what was accomplished, despite us not being where I'd hoped we'd be at the end of the year.
Private Alpha Demo: I was able to share the alpha demo with a small group of 5 of 6 friends and devs. This is a really small starting group, so I had to take feedback with a grain of salt, but allowed me to get some early thoughts on what things were working (or not) before sharing it with a broader audience. That has proved very helpful as they were able to highlight a variety of fixes or small improvements that I could make and I generally think it has helped increase the quality of the first act before I move forward with a public alpha demo sometime in 2023. So while it wasn’t the public demo I wanted at the end of this year, I’m still pleased we got a demo out into some folks hands.
Environment & Character Art: Last year was the year of struggling to find an environment artist, and were super lucky to bring on
Erel Matita in January. We've since gone on to complete a little over
70% of all the core environments this year. Now, as the project has grown, we may end up needing additional assets, but still really pleased with the overall progress. We also added
Nora Potwora as a character artist midway through 2022 and that had a BIG impact on how many characters we were able to make. We've completed over
80% of the core character art pieces. Again, we may find that long-term we need to expand the amount of content (and there is a ton I would love to include but cannot for budgetary purposes) but a lot of the "Core" assets I believe we need were completed this year. Which is a big accomplishment.
Meet ‘Bauson’ – A Recruitable Friend
Animation: We’re also now about
70% of the way through both character and environment animations. For the most part we’re completing animations as the art is getting completed so—knock on wood—we haven’t really hit any big bottlenecks on this.
Jaang Eimyoung has been leading the way on character animation and
Arman Harutyunyan on environmental animations. I’m very lucky to have the two of them on this project as the animation continues to be one of the strongest elements in this project.
LARGE GIF WARNING – A New Environment “Mouth of the Warren”
Meet ‘Oakleaf’ – A Diplomat in Moonbriar
Writing & Development: This is one area where we are probably the most behind. We have the first act fully written and implemented, and have the remaining 3 acts outlined but we’re really only just now getting into fleshing out the 2nd Act with dialogue and prepping to implement it. I’m pretty happy with the quality of the writing, and we were forced to throw out a lot of the early writing in 2022 when we realized the story needed some significant changes. My hope is that we’ll be able to move faster here given that the foundation has been laid—and a year ago—that wasn’t really the case. But, it’s definitely been a lot slower in this regard than I expected. If there is a bottleneck, writing has been it. But, significant strides were made this year and early feedback from the private alpha demo seems to indicate the writing we have done is pretty solid. Hopefully that will remain the case as the broader audience gets exposed to it next year.
Haha, yeah, it might be mechanically simple but making a visual novel involves, well, writing a novel, which itself is no mean feat!
This was actually a
great reminder,
Prinsessa. I've done a decent amount of writing before so I should have not underestimated the level of effort needed to write the game, but I somehow have.
Music, SFX, & Voice Acting: We’re really only getting into this all now. I began Voice Over tests with maybe the hardest thing to voice:
Children. There is a small flashback scene early in the game where we see two characters interacting as children. The best way to voice a child is—surprisingly—with a child. Of course, to make matters complicated, it’s also a fairly dramatic sequence so finding a professional voice acting child who can also act and display emotions proved to be quite the serious challenge for getting my feet wet with Voice Acting. I did end up getting the scenes cast and voiced and they turned out pretty well, but do also present some challenges with the children either not acting enough or occasionally over-acting. I was able to get the voice-acting in game with little issue but definitely found the first tests of casting and recording to be pretty challenging. I do believe that I likely should end up doing Voice Acting in the demo that releases next year. So I’m sort of anticipating this will be an expensive and time-consuming part of my Q1 2023. We shall see.
The SFX has been added throughout the game, both UI/UX as well as general nature ambience. While some of it is placeholder, others I feel have turned out pretty well and SFX as whole goes a long way in making the game feel more complete. Music is something I’m currently exploring some tests with, and hope to get that moving forward early into the new year as well.
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Thank you to everyone who read and followed and commented on Moonbriar in 2022. Your encouragement, ideas, and support have been invaluable. Looking forward to what 2023 has in store for all of us. Merry Christmas!