Complete tile overhaul, sound updates (Patreon)

New tiles & Homebase

Last week our first big order of tiles came in, healing with some of the very important ones such as grass, trees, our decorative rocks, various lanterns & water. These new tiles have allowed us to completely change the look of our game, making it all fit together much more cohesively. 

These changes aren't just in the homebase, in our gardens area, all rooms have been reworked as well to include these new tiles & decorations to spruce them up a bit more. 

SFX & Music

This is of course harder to showcase with GIFs, but we have finally implemented the different pieces of music we got commissioned before, as well as some other songs that really fit the vibe if you ask me. 

On top of music, another very important thing was changing our SFX. Until about a week ago, everyone in the team played the game muted in Unity, as it was just too much pain to bear. This was a piece of feedback we got during the playtest as well, since we are using Top Down Engine, and it's default sound effects that manage our player. This meant however that picking up an item made the sound of a gun reloading, and dashing was a literal gunshot. 

We have changed all of these old sounds, and whilst not everything has a sound just yet, the changes we've made so far were a lot of the quick wins, such as attacking, taking damage, moving,... These have greatly improved the gamefeel as well, as you can hear the effects of your attacks. 

Progress Grab Bag

Some extra, smaller improvements we added over the past week:

- We added the first "tutorial" use of Master Sun, where he appears once to explain a concept such as blessings.

- We fixed a very high amount of bugs that have been stacking up over the past week(s).

- We added even more commissioned item sprites & implemented most of them as well.

- We added a UX improvement that you can select in what slot you would pick up artifacts, also allowing you to swap once you have 2 artifacts and want to pickup a 3rd one. 

What's Next

We're very close to our next devlog and public playtest, so the feature train will stop for a bit. 

We just received our warrior with Qiang order, so we can start working on one of our last mechanics, being able to change weapons in the homebase. As the actual attack still need to be programmed, this will most likely not be implemented on time for the playtest however. 

Some of the things we'll try to get sorted out in the next few days still is some UX changes, making it easier to open/close windows, adding even more/better SFX, and taking another look at our controls as we're not happy there.

For next year (January), we are planning on getting at least 1 extra character implemented, so we can get working on the character swapping mechanic as well. Then all of our main mechanics will be done, and it's just a matter of UX, Bugfixing, more art, and more content. 

We believe we will get the game done mechanically by next month, after which it will be a lot of art commissioning, which will take time (our Qiang warrior took about 10 days). We are currently looking at releasing the full game end of March/early April instead of our original date of January 29th, but will have a pretty solid demo available from next month as well.