Hey everyone,
It’s been two months since this Kickstarter campaign ended early April. Though many things just started to go full throttle by mid-late April (because of the fund transfer time gap), a lot of things have been done so far. Today’s update will cover many stuffs from illustrations, animations, playable areas, to music tracks.
Illustrations: Colours are In
As the line arts for main casts are finished and approved, last week our illustrators have moved onto the colouring phase. Below are some of the first results on the colours:
Ylianne’s colours are vibrant and cheerful, with intricate motifs to contrast her with the bleakness of the human world. We’re keeping the feather hair ornament as a distinctive element which will be carried on to the next designs.
White, red, and gold, are the main colours for the Church of Deus Valarus as well as House Geraldine. Aria was coloured accordingly in the first decade to reflect the close ties between her family and religion. Also note that she looks less cute and leaning to the serious side when the colours have been applied.
Animations: Eight Directional Movement
When we showed off the prototype build, one of the most popular requests was to improve the animations to have eight directional movements instead of four. We heard what you asked for, and have worked to make it happen. Below are the current animations for Aria’s movement:
Making the first few frames is always much more difficult. We had to do that for the diagonal movement, since the original prototype had only four directions. There were some trial and errors, which took some time, but now that we have the bases the next sprites can follow them as guidelines.
Illustrations: Alternate Costumes
Back when the Kickstarter campaign was still going, we showed our designs for Aria’s costumes and let you pick the one you like most. Now we’re giving you a peek to another character’s set of possible alternate costumes! Below are three design sketches we’ve made for Lucienne:
We’ll finish all six of them and post them in a backers-only update. Because only Vanguard-tier backers and above will get these costumes, we will only notify them for those updates. We’ll ask for their choices and tally their votes. After their final colours are done, we’ll show the results to everyone. We hope it’s OK with you 🙂
Exploration Assets: Reed and Reynard’s Prologue
As you could see from the prototype, the colouring for exploration assets were very vibrant. It may be fitting for some areas, but for we had to remake them for darker and dirtier parts of the game. Reynard’s prologue was our experiment on making a darker kind of forest. We used darker shades of green and blue for the area. Below is the work-in-progress:
Don’t mind the shuriken-looking thing. That icon notes a particle effect that should be in play there when the game is running.
On the other hand, one of Reed’s prologue area is a barren, broken village. For this we used a dirty-brown approach, with dry grasses and dead trees to enhance the mood. Below’s the work-in-progress:
After this we’ll move on to Ylianne’s and Lucienne’s prologues. Cammile and Aria will start their prologues in cities, which are a lot more difficult to make, so we’re keeping them for later and focusing on natural, organic areas first.
Audio Tracks: Character Prologues
In the audio department there have been a lot of going back and forth. We revised dozens of sketch tracks, tuning them to fit the mood and ambience of the game. Tracks for each character’s prologues were scheduled for today’s update, but we finished a bit short with just five of them done.
While we’re a bit off the mark, some of the rejected tracks have been set aside to used for other means, for example area-related or mood-related BGMs. So it’s not all for nothing. We’ve prepared a backup plan so this month make up for the delay and keep in schedule 🙂
As you listen to these tracks, what kind of prologue scenes do you see happening for them? You may want to put it into repeat to get the feel, but not sure if Soundcloud supports looping just one track.
Kickstarter Highlight: Pale Blue
Our friends and fellow countrymen Tinker Games are currently running an amazing Kickstarter campaign! Pale Blue is an epic 2D side-scrolling action and stealth adventure game with immersive visuals where you take control of Ellen as “Villain” in semi free-roaming environments coupled with a variety of gameplay mechanics that will capture the hearts and minds of action platformer fans!
For you who likes to play platformers, or just appreciate great-looking Japanese-style art, this may be your kind of game. You can click on the image to visit the page 🙂
That’s about it for today’s update! As always, we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts either through the comments section or by direct messaging.
See you later!