SLARPG: General update July 2020 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! I apologize for not doing a monthly update last month. In all honesty, progress has been slower than I expected this summer, and I haven't had much to share. It probably shouldn't be surprising that the state of the world hasn't been conducive to focusing on work. I know I'm not the only one who expected to hunker down and be productive during quarantine, only to realize that living through a pandemic during a nightmarish election year kind of fries your brain a little bit.

SLARPG Stuff

That's not to say no progress has been made on the game, though! I previously reported that I was working on SLARPG's opening scenes and everything prior to Melody reaching Greenridge (which the demo skipped over). Work on that is complete for now, so I've returned to making more new content for later in the game.

In particular, I've been working on the second settlement in SLARPG's world! I don't want to call them all "towns" because I feel like that just puts the image of another Greenridge in your head, but yes, SLARPG has more than one area with a bunch of friendly NPCs and shops and whatnot. We're very excited to expand the game's world like this... but we're gonna have to keep bottling up that excitement, because I would consider everything about this second settlement spoilers. Oops. We've already shown a lot, and the experience of playing the game will be more fun if I haven't shown everything ahead of time.

Making progress on this new area means that we're getting closer and closer to that fabled milestone... the halfway point of the game. As I've explained before, SLARPG's story is divided into five acts, and I would estimate that the end of Act II (which we're nearing) is roughly the halfway point of the game, more or less. We hoped to hit this point sooner, but I had to take on a lot of commission work to pay the bills earlier this year, and I also decided to finish more content for this pre-Alpha build (such as the entire intro sequence, which I was originally going to make later). Every day now we're getting closer and closer to that major milestone, and when we finally hit it we're going to do a big round of private playtesting with friends and family.  Trust me when I say we're all dying to get some eyes on all this stuff we've been working on.

(And, for the record, while only half of the game will be playable when we hit this milestone, we're definitely well past the halfway point in terms of overall work. The first half of the game required all the foundational work--sprites and mugshots for all the major characters, tilesets for most areas in the game, all the UI, figuring out the core gameplay, moves for all the party members, a bunch of recurring music, etc.--which won't have to be repeated for the back half. For instance, if an area is visited in both the first and second halves of the game, I only have to design it once.)

Twitch

In other news, if you haven't heard, I've begun streaming games on my Twitch channel! I'm starting off with a full playthrough of BioWare's Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, which was requested by someone on my Archie Sonic blog Thanks Ken Penders. This is just something I'm doing for fun a few hours a week, so don't worry about it distracting me from work or anything. I did, however, become an Affiliate really quickly, which allows me to make custom emotes. And naturally, the first one I made was...

(the Allison Pog is also available on my Patreon Discord server)

We also plan on doing a couple SLARPG dev team streams on my Twitch channel in the future! We'd like to do another Q&A, because it's been way too long since the last one, and we'd also like to do developer commentary on the demo. I'll keep y'all posted about that.

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And that's where we're at! Sorry about the lack of screenshots, but again, SLARPG is a game with many surprises in store. Progress has been slow and the world falling apart hasn't helped, but we're still getting there, slowly but surely. As always, your continued support is appreciated. Stay safe out there, y'all!