Kandria
Tutorialising
A shorter update this week!
Tutorial
I've been working on a tutorial that introduces the base controls in the game. It's now mostly complete and working pretty well! Have a look:
There's a few things that are still missing and need to be tutorialised, namely the quick menu for healing items and the combat related mechanics such as short and heavy attacks and dodging.
I'm far less certain on how to introduce those, let alone the finer points of both the platforming and combat mechanics. However, I think that as long as we make sure the player is aware of all the possible buttons, we can teach the rest through clever level design instead of explicit tutorials and prompts.
Marketing
Thanks to one of Pro Helvetia's initiatives I have the fortune of an hour of mentorship from Chris Zukowsky every month for the next six months. He'll help us figure out our marketing. I've had the first session last Friday, and his advice was primarily twofold:
Focus on top of the funnel marketing, primarily doing festivals, streamers, and possibly reddit or imgur.
Do blind testing
Tim has been doing some excellent work researching similar games and their communities, so we're going to continue working on that and see what we can figure out.
For my part, I'm going to continue trying imgur when I can think of something to say, and possibly cross-post to reddit as well, though that part is a bit scary to me. More importantly though, I'm going to see that I can do some more blind testing.
If you or someone you know haven't played Kandria yet and would be up for letting me watch you play it through a Discord screenshare or something, please let me know! Just reply to the email, and we can figure out a date. Doing this would really help us out tremendously to figure out problems that we can't see because we're too close to the project.
Mikel
After completing the track for our latest trailer, I set about writing an ambience track for the map's main underground area! After playing around with some more unusual VST instruments, we finally set upon the classic combo of bass guitar, strummed electric guitar, vocals, and shimmering strings. Here's the final version if you'd like to have a listen:
Now that the 'normal' version of the underground ambience is complete, it's time to do a 'quiet' version that we can fade in and out for very, very ambient moments. I'll also do another version used for combat in case you run into any Walkers in your adventures. I look forward to seeing how these work in-game once Shinmera finishes building his system!
Other than that, it's been awesome seeing what the rest of the team have been working on and sharing ideas on our usual biweekly meetings - stay tuned!