Kandria
Our new project, Eternia: Pet Whisperer, is now on Steam!
This is a short visual novel game that we started working on this week. We'll finish it in the coming week, and it should become available for purchase on Steam on May 3rd. It'll only be a 1$, as we're mostly using this as a test to see what it feels like to release a commercial game on Steam. I hope you'll support us and enjoy a short (~1h) visual novel!
The game is about a tired office worker looking to spice up their life a bit. In hopes of doing that you visit a futuristic animal shelter, the Rainbow Dome. There you come across a variety of animals, all looking for a new home. But, 6 in particular stick out to you, and it turns out they each harbour a secret for you to uncover!
It's been a lot of fun (and a lot of work!) getting this game together on the quick. It's all running in the same engine as Kandria, Trial, with many parts from Kandria taken over and slightly adapted. I had most of the game code, including menu screen and all, done by Tuesday night, actually!
Still, there's a lot left to do in this coming week:
Missing animal portraits
Missing backgrounds
Music and sound effects
Animal icons and achievements
Trailer
Writing for the remaining animals
Regardless though I think we should be able to get it all done in time, and even if we can't we have a bit of leftover time before it's available for purchase, as Steam imposes a minimum wait time of two weeks after the page has been opened.
Kandria
As this project is an intentional break from Kandria we haven't worked much on that. I still did some hotfix duty to iron out breaking bugs people have been encountering, but so far there hasn't been much in that regard. It's been really cool seeing people respond to the updated demo, and we've got some good feedback in as well!
It's honestly been super stressful to push it out last week, as I knew there were still so many things left that we could have improved and polished. Still, I'm glad it's finally out and that we've been able to put some distance between us with Eternia.
I haven't put together an exact plan for the time after Eternia's done yet, but I'll get to that next week. I think we'll need to spend a good amount of time dialling back before continuing on. Meaning going back over everything, polishing, and iterating on the various systems and parts until they're better. Particularly I want to focus on improving the level design and combat.
If you haven't looked at the updated demo yet, please do so and let us know what you think! There's over an hour's worth of playable content and it should give you a fair idea of what the overall game will be like.
Composers
Today marks the deadline of the composers' submissions! Everything we've gotten has been amazing, and it's been a real joy to work with them to iterate to the final tracks. But, don't take my work for it. Here they are:
It's really interesting how all three directions are so different, yet all very fitting in their own way. It certainly isn't going to be easy to make the final decision, ha ha. I hope to somehow figure that out by Wednesday, and settle a final contract by the end of the week so the final candidate can start with us next month.
I hope you enjoyed listening to the tracks and will check the composers out. They're each very talented people with some great past projects to look at!
Onwards
Alright, that's about it for this week's update! I hope you look forward to the release of Eternia: Pet Whisperer as much as we are, and in the meantime please wishlist the game on Steam, it really does help us a lot!
Oh, and our Discord server has also been gaining some traction, and it's been really nice to see people's reactions to the new demo there!