Kandria
Graphics!
This week had a lot of work on the visual side of things, with new concept work, promo art, and effects. But, as usual, that's not all!
Steam capsule update
We finally finished a new capsule for our Steam page!
Fred did the background, and I did the character art and logo. The new logo is also a step up from our previous plain text:
Main menu
As I wasn't happy with the main menu effect from last week I set out to do something new. I implemented a wave simulation that runs fully on the GPU, and used that to create a kind of drizzling rain effect. Paired with a soft background that already looked quite good.
Then I used the new logo art and combined it with another glitch effect that I developed specifically for that. I'm liking the end result quite a bit:
Can't wait to see what it feels like once Mikel finishes the music track for it!
Mods
On the side I've had the burning desire to start something new, and I only narrowly avoided starting on a Switch port of SBCL/Trial. It's good that I avoided that though, as it would be a gigantic undertaking and would eat far too much of my time.
I've instead settled on the much more manageable extra of furthering modding support. The first step I've taken towards that now is implementing a client library for the mod.io API. mod.io is a platform that allows people to share and manage mods for various games without having to rely on platform-specific tools like the Steam Workshop.
Having support for mod.io natively means that you'll be able to browse, download, upload, and manage mods directly in-game, regardless of where you get the game from, be it Steam, itch, or whatever comes in the future.
Once the client library is complete there's still a lot of other work left to do though, such as implementing the UI for mods in the game, and more pressingly, having a build system that can manage the mods at all. That part is a bit of a bigger undertaking, and I might start tackling that during my holidays in September. We'll see!
Tim
This week I helped proof the Pro Helvetia pitch submission, adding more games to the market research section too. I also worked on more quest fixes from the playtests, including reducing the spawn rate of items as it was feeling too busy. I also added all the fish item descriptions.
Fred
Meanwhile Fred focused on more concept art for the middle region of the game, doing some prep work for the horizontal slice:
Mikel
Mikel finished the desert tracks this week, which turned out real nice:
Only thing left now for the submission is the main menu track, which should be doable in the time left!