Next Fest is here! (Patreon)

New sprites walls & interactables

One of the last big visual changes we still wanted to do before Next Fest started, was updating our walls and placeholder interactables in the homebase. We got these implemented mere hours before the fest started, but they were a massive change in overall visual style. 

Tutorial

Our biggest day 1 feedback of the Next Fest was people being very confused about what they actually have to do. Luckily this was a relatively simple fix for us, requiring us only to create the localization strings and turn them into dialogue popups. 

Through our tutorials we give a simple getting started explenation, what the goal of the game is, and what every interactable station in the homebase does, such as swapping weapons, viewing previously acquired loot, changing heirloom,... 

Progress Grab Bag

Apart from the visual improvements, we spent the rest of the week working through some bugs that we really had to solve before Next Fest, and some other small issues such as: 

- Updated some visual elements such as the health regen animation

- Fixed some bugs and inconsistencies with stat changes

- Our store page now has a trailer & gifs!

- Updated the homebase music

What's Next?

The Next Fest is currently going on, and brought a bunch of crunch with it as well. Now that the big issues such as the lack of tutorials have been solved, we're taking it a bit easier, and just letting the Next Fest play out before regrouping. 

In terms of numbers, Next Fest isn't doing too hot for us currently (we've gotten 80 in the first 2 days, yikes). This will have an impact on the amount of future investments we will still be putting into Songs of Everjade before release. 

The current thought is to reduce the scope quite a bit, mainly cutting the different playable characters & accompanying weapons, and focusing on still adding the stage progression and enemy variety to a good level. 

These are just ideas, we've got no solid new scope yet, but will start working on that in the next week. You'll get to know more about the exact future of Songs of Everjade next week. In the meantime, you can go and watch our video about the future of our game development in general, where we also discuss some of the struggles we've had with Songs of Everjade.