Kandria

We're making good progress on the horizontal slice!

Did you read last week's monthly update? Quite a bit happened last month, and we're now getting up to speed working on the horizontal slice!

Region 1 is complete

Region 1 is now complete in terms of horizontal slice rooms. The rooms aren't tiled in yet though, as we first need to playtest everything and adapt the difficulty to make sure stuff actually matches up and feels good to play.

https://courier.tymoon.eu/api/courier/file/view?id=K6vTL93g%2FTI4rM0DGK7WWA%3D%3D

The map you see here is about 1.5 x 0.8km big, and encompasses roughly 1/3rd of the total map size we're aiming for for the full game. From here things are going to grow vertically by quite a bit.

While we wait for feedback from internal tests and volunteers, I'll get started with drafting out region 2. Hopefully I'll have a rough sketch of that done by next week, though knowing how much time level design takes, it'll probably have to be two weeks instead.

New platforming mechanics

As part of the new levels I created and updated couple of the platforming mechanics. There's now dash-rechargers, springs, and the ability to enter crawlspaces from the air. This is all in addition to the directional spikes, falling platforms, elevators, and all the other movement abilities that already existed before.

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There's a bunch more mechanical elements that I have on my todo that I'll get to soon, but for now I wanted to constrain region 1 to only a couple of elements and keep the others for region 2 and 3. Not just because it'll give me more time, but also because it'll give the areas more of a unique feel and lead to smoother progression.

Tim

It's taken a bit longer than I expected to get back up to speed with the scripting language and quest logic this week - especially since the first quest of act 2 needed a bit of fancy NPC placement and an interruption of the player's exploration. But with Nick's help I've gotten to a good solution. Act 2 also thrusts you into dialogue with three new characters. I'll keep it high-level, but there's a risk of SPOILERS depending on how into the plot you are (this will be true for most updates I expect while I'm working on the horizontal slice).

So the new characters are the Semi Sisters leaders and the missing Noka hunter Alex, and I've been figuring out their voices. I already had references to use from their bios, which I find a great help - but nevertheless it's a slower time as I figure them out in narrative. All said and done though, I'm now well on my way to rounding out the mainline quests for act 2 in first-draft form, which should coincide nicely since Nick has finished the draft level design.

We're looking for testers!

If you're interested in helping us test the new areas for the game, let us know! You can reply directly to this email, and we'll see about getting you hooked up for testing. We're especially interested in feedback from people that have colour blindness or other kinds of impairments so that we can improve the accessibility of the game!

That's all for now

This has been a pretty stressful week for me with all the levelling, bugfixing, and the extra work and stress piled on me from setting up a company in Poland for the Digital Dragons accelerator.

I'm really looking forward to just relaxing with some games tomorrow. I've been playing Swery's The Good Life and Forza Horizon 5 recently, both of them are a blast, but for very different reasons. How about yourself?