Looking good, later I’ll search for the Steam page (assuming is already there).
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No worries, I plan to make it free if Steam allows.
EDIT: they do allow. all early access builds will be free 
Just sharing the first clip of battle scene with pixel sprites. Still some refining to do.
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Finishing up Fort Level design, sharing Barracks and Armory
going to get quiet until release now
edit: let me share these at least
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I just want to know how you make all this content so quickly. Do you have a team of 200 people working for you? That must be it. I leave for one week and come back to 800,000 words.
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It’s a matter of finding the right people. There’s about 3 artists and 3 programmers working atm, since their work comes after we finish these features.
Hiring the right people to do the right job, essentially playing to ppl’s strengths. It’s sorta like Game Dev Tycoon on Steam.
WIP #1 on world map. This is again, color blocking. zooming in and adding tons of macro details:
Lots of detail to add, so this will be another 2 weeks, It’ll be used in-game as our world map.
WIIP battle sprites:
Penelope’s set is nearly complete.
Lieutenant Swordsman Boss in progress
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UPDATE!
Hey everyone, I’m a dev working on this project taking charge for Copywright for a short period (until later this month) He’s had a health situation come up and was forced to cease his work for the time being. Things are still moving along, but we are behind schedule now by a few weeks. So this demo is going to be pushed ahead slightly from here, but definitely not on hold. A precise date will be coming when he comes back to working and can get a better idea of where he wants the demo to be on release.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but at least it’s just temporary and more updates will be following later this month, including all the new artwork to share that’s getting completed by our artists.
Take care until you hear back!
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Shoutout to @Cody for holding down the fort!!
I’m finally free again – and I did a TON of writing… since I couldn’t write any code. I’ll be spending a lot of time getting all our tasks laid out, writing in Articy, and programming narrative cutscenes. Should be fun.
Art Dump
Art has been doing well in my absence, the battle sprites have been going really well.
Artur’s Critical
I plugged this one in before I was out of commission – it’s awesome. I’ll be tweaking the timing of certain things, though.
Lieutenant Boss
Our upcoming “boss” in chapter 1.
Zenovia’s Critical
Finishing Penelope’s Set
Penelope’s good to go into battle now! Jacques is also finished, but I haven’t received the content yet. Probably show it in my next post.
Infantry Knight
We had to make separate animations for Knight’s who’re lance users/have the Infantry Class.
Just one critical animation missing and “Lance Knight” is complete.
World Map WIP # 2
Detailing of terrain is underway. Next up are the locations/settlements.
Anyway, just saying hello again.
Game development is unpredictable at times, but I can say for certain that our next alpha will be next month. Hopefully, in time for FEE3.
See you all soon.
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Checking in for an unusual update today.
Before I get into that, let’s share some progress:
We’re working on our UI a bit, getting our pause menu and start screen started ahead of finishing our save system.
You’ll notice an option to turn of battle cinematics and have all combat on the map. I personally will never use it, because battle sprites rock but… I’m told some people like it this way.
The UI in the end will look nicer, custom sliders and all that jazz.
Got a locked door animation going, the entry to the fort’s dungeon.
This one is a WIP of our cinematic trailer:
This one is 58 frames and the pixel art piece above is a WIP of frame #1.
Our Lance knight set is complete, with this critical attack
We are killing bugs and putting some final touches on our dialogue system. I have been working hard on a google doc for all the dialog I’ve written while I was out. ~40 pages of dialogue atm, it’s wild. I should finish off Chapter 1’s batch tomorrow, then start throwing it all into Articy.
It’s pretty much a spoiler alert, but this is the doc. Be warned that there’s some mature themes.
There’s a lot of writers here, so I figure I should share. I would love to hear about any ideas and what you liked, didnt like. If you’re looking, you mind find me typing it up lol
What I have been working super hard on the past few days (aside from writing dialogue), is the preparation for Kickstarter.
I’ve got a large poster of our game cover on the way, received our uncolored drawn map in the mail soon, and have some sample letterman jackets and tees being made.
If anyone is curious about the process (since I had zero clue about how to have these made):
I found a reliable sourcer to create our jackets. I spoke to a few sources in China, but the source I’m using is from Pakistan. “Sourcers” are just people with factory connections (or people who are really good at using Alibaba to find sources… I can’t read chinese so… ?) who can relay what I want to them and feed me prices. Basically, a middle man.
Anyway, I found a good factory source and paid for a few samples. I have one for myself, but I am sending some to my teammates. Then, I had the embroidery done for the jackets, just to make sure the factory didnt botch them. Etsy is the best:
(we’re Makeshift Software Inc. btw)
I got these done and sent the files to my source, so they can use their fancy embroidery machine to make it exactly as pictured.
As for the tees, I am able to do these locally. Grab a couple 100% black/dark-greyish hemp t-shirts and head to my local screen printer…
Anyway, I have an appointment with a local videographer for the end of the month, so we’ll be shooting the Kickstarter video soon.
As the game progresses, I’m making sure we have everything ready to shoot our shot.
I’ll be adding tees and the jackets for sale on mysterybabylon.io pretty soon. But! These will also be KS rewards to our backers.
I’ll post the rewards brackets soon, the last thing I need to do is prepare those graphics (which should be relatively easy).
Anyway, the campaign itself will take place a week or two post-alpha release of Chapter 1.
I want to circulate the demo a ton before we launch. I’ll be adding a way to sign up for our mailing list into the game’s start screen (which is where the web development skill becomes clutch).
The next update will be back to normal, but I’ll sprinkle some photos of how the end results turned out as well.
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Back again. Here’s some progress:
Jacques Animation Set
he might look tiny, but the other battle sprites get downsize to his original size. Battle sprites are all over the place but we reached a consensus with the artists to get stringent with resolution for these.
First Frame of out 58 frame Intro
You know how games sometimes have those cool starting animations? Like a Tales of game and the anime is just doing tons of character reveal spoilers? This is that.
I saw some cool stuff being done with CRT/scanline filters on twitter, so I gave it a go here. I am convinced that this cinematic will be awesome with it.
Programming wise, we’re closing the book on non-battle scene combat, like for AI vs AI combat. Or, if you enable the skip battle cinematics in the options.
I’m working on getting it absolutely bulletproof, and it’s getting close.
We are also finishing up our dialogue system. It was basically done, but there was no way to have actions that happen in between dialogue fragments. So we made this:
We call them “Ghost Dialogues”. We can write out all our sequences, then I will go in and add these coded dialogues to have things happen before and after someone says something – no built in support for that in Articy yet.
I’ll be using these to take the dialog from the doc (I completed transcribing Chapter 1, btw) and bringing them to life in-game.
In other news, I got another backer reward:
Pretty sweet.
Another preparation for the video.
Last thing: the newsletter is alive. Please visit mysterybabylon.io and it will annoyingly pop up at you. I’d appreciate if everyone interested in the project joined our mailing list. It’ll be cool, I swear.
I’ll be using the Mailchimp API to put a mailing list sign up right before the cinematic & start screen as well. It’ll be skippable, though.
Ok – radio silence again for a bit. We are actually nearly through all our battle sprites we need for chapter 1, so I’m excited.
Lots of portraits and overworld sprites and animations to be made, though.
Lance Knight and Penelope are all set. Jacques is next, only missing his Idle.
Zenovia should get done soon, the artist is taking a break to ease burn out.
There’s only 1 set of battle animations left after her:
Lieutenant Boss, who is in progress already.
It would typically be two more for the characters recruitable in Chapter 1, but I am cheating and having them be Ally Units instead of Player Units (since only Player Units have battle sprites). That way, we can do theirs later.
If we have the time, we’ll do the two more sets of 7 battle animations. Actually, for Harold I would need two sets of 7, which is annoying.
- 1 set for when you fight against him
- 1 set for when he joins you
For Benjamin, I’d need:
- 1 set where he’s on foot
- 1 set for when he’s back on horseback
Which is pretty annoying. You can see why I’m making them Ally Units 
. I might even need ANOTHER set for Harold for when he changes armor after joining in Chapter 2. Each set takes around 1-2 week(s).
I got some feedback that they felt the battle cinematics are too long. Attention spans grow smaller by the year, but I will be working on holding down Z on keyboard or A on gamepad to speed it up. Every one is different, after all.
I’ve been twiddling my fingers a bit this weekend. I finished the writing for Chapter 1, but I must wait until the code for “Ghost Dialogues” is pushed until I can add it into the game. I also want to debug the overworld combat, but it’s already being done…
So, I did this:
This will be the first scene you see in the alpha when it’s released. Why do I care so much about mailing lists?:
The chart shows the difference in funding with larger mailing lists for KS campaigns (though, not all the data is from video game campaigns). So, the idea is to put this in the demo and drive up our mailing list numbers >:]
It will be skippable by holding Space for 3 seconds.
Anyway, things that are blocking me should start opening up after the holidays.
This week – I am in charge of debugging this combat system.
It’s pretty tricky since a lot of stuff is asynchronous, so the timing of events firing can go wrong. I’m trying to salvage the events and see if I can get the system as bulletproof as I’d like.
If not, it’s only ~150 lines of code so I can always do a rewrite (which would suck!). But, I’m killing lots of bugs and it’s become rather stable. Aside from the healing, where they are going green super saiyan (damn you, Unity’s Particle Effects System!).
There’s also this thing where an AIUnit will move to a target then just… freeze. Great times. Going to kill it though!
I need to get the combat system to allow for Hit Reaction and Dodge animations to play, before doing EXP calculations.
Anywho, the code for lootable corpses is done and I finally got these sprites to play the die animation and remain dead.
Now, I’m working on bugfixes and testing. After that, I’ll be messing with the speed because the attacks are a bit slow. Aaand after that, I’ll be adding damage #'s and critical attack text, maybe a bit of camera shaking upon critical attacks.
The funny part is that none of these battles will even happen in the demo, lol. This is my sandbox for testing before I setup the battles for that.
The player vs enemy battle system is pretty much done – it’s a matter of sprites being ready, really.
Dialogue System is being worked on this week as well. My hope is to finish off the On Map Combat this week, then spend the rest of the month on implementing dialogues/cutscenes.
I’ll have to add some UI work to my backlog as well:
(So many people call “Artur” “Arthur”, I might as well just rename him lol)
Finally got to plug in Jacques. He’s a little OP atm, he’s one shotting these guys with low chance to hit, though. His critical animation is still a bit of a WIP, the artist didn’t animate the movement, so his jump is pretty unnoticeable
Still fighting with my overworld combat system. The cool battle scene needs some minor adjustments as well.
Instead of C# delegate spam, I’m thinking I’ll just have functions that take explicit callbacks. I tried to OOP my way out of it and it worked worse
I’ll figure it out – it’s quite annoying when bugs happen “sometimes”, so you gotta spam playtests to get it to happen. A few playthroughs with no mishaps has you thinking you’re home free… till you play it again and a bug you thought was fixed pops up 
But yep, that’s my current issue
EDIT: I AM GETTING CLOSER – thank you, Jesus
One of my teammates added a handy speed up key. Once I’m convinced the combat system is bug free, I’ll add it to support attack animations.
23/58 frames for our first “cinematic” – I’m going for a series of 8 second cinematics fading in and out. 58 is expensive, so this will likely be the only one before KS. I’m slapping an awesome CRT filter on this when it’s done, for cinematic effect.
As if I needed more UI work to handle, I got this:
Dialog System’s last touches aren’t in my possession yet, so I’ll likely handle all these new UI updates after combat system decides to behave.
More on that stuff later!
We got the skeleton of our “Roster” screen animated:
It needs one last adjustment and it’s good to go.
Our Cutscene and Dialogue Systems are nearly finished! Which means I get to transfer in a boatload of them from the Google Doc into Articy then into the game.
On Map Combat is becoming more stable, one or two stubborn intermittent bugs remain. We’re adding damage text and dodge text to it now.
Working on our Kickstarter page, I just submitted it for review and launch is still a week away from whenever we put our new beta up on Early Access.
Only things missing is our hidden stretch goals graphics and the video (which I’ll be shooting at the end of the month, when my custom jacket and tee are in my possession.
Still plan to be ready for FEE3.
Sharing a bit of our cutscene system. Made a few alterations and it’s now flexible enough for what I need to put into the demo!
Long term, we’re going to replace many of the systems, but it will do nicely for our demo.
I’ll be working on all the dialogue and cutscenes for Chapter 1’s release… likely until release time. There’s 48 pages worth of dialogue and cutscenes to put in, so I’ll need 2-3 weeks of programming and testing, etc.
The good news is that I should have all the tools I need now. Except AI following the moving player, which will be added this week.
More Dialogue System on diisplay. This happens Post-Tutorial and it’s one of the more prominent decisions to be made here.
Battle system is nearly bulletproof, small things keep popping up but the most disturbing bgs are conquered.
Be back with more later – I do think keeping these as a surprise is more fun.
Our preview page for Kickstarter is live! Still lots of work to be done before launching next month. Finishing up the Chapter 1 build is key – then circulating it around.
Last cutscene footage I’ll share until release!
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Sharing production progress on our jacket samples.
In other news, I went to a Renaissance fair in PA today. Scored a sweet sword.
It’ll make an appearance in the Kickstarter video.
First non-gamedev update in a while! More on that soon
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So, I am working on tying things together and debugging our builds. Still a ton of content to add, but we’ll make it.
Leading up to the actual demo release, I’m going to share weekly playtest builds for anyone interested in that sort of thing.
Known Bugs:
- Dont let anyone die. Win/Lose Conditions are done, but the game over screen and retry logic isn’t yet
- You can’t leave the map yet, since I’m working on that now – after polishing off this map.
- The camera can show the black areas between transitions. This is an annoyance from one of our camera plugins – and I’ll get it right later
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If you step into talking to dialogue triggers for two different ppl, it’ll leave you unable to speak to the other person. Simple fix, but low on the radar atm
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Esc brings up the pause menu – this stuff is still in progress. The Roster screen only works in battle for now (since we haven’t stored our Roster in a persistent way, yet)
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Left shift lets you run in overworld battle when moving with the arrow. Penelope’s run animation is not done, so dont try it with her yet…
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Potions are infinite use and doesnt end your turn atm. by design for debugging and since any unit dying is a game over, so…
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about balance: there isn’t any yet. Artur and Jacques are pretty likely to critical a MF’er right now while Penelope’s bow barely does damage. This is easy to change, so I’m leaving it as it atm.
If anyone has any UI scaling issues or anything like that, let me know.
Windows Build: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aBkAWnJBUL7WpGsz7mHu8GiAjLO1gjLD/view?usp=sharing
I figure about 2-3 more weeks before we push onto Early Access. Fort Outdoor and Fort Interior levels are up next, I’ll share a playtest build for that in a week or so.
Christian’s branching decisions took time to get right – I can already see how branching narratives are a bitch and a half to do right.
Anyway, play it if you can. Tell me how it sucks and we’ll fix it. If you find a bug or have a good suggestion, go ahead and leave it below.
I’m getting serious about doing these builds early and often – pick up any bugs that you dont see when playing locally.
that is all.
PRO-TIP: Space bar skips the text animation. Spamming Z and Space bar will turbospeed the dialogue.
EDIT: oop, quick notice about sound – a lot of it is still off. SFX/music will be added last.
Another thing is saving. Not yet – I am still focused on getting these dialogue sequences imported.
Lots of stuff is unpolished atm, but I promise we’ll get to that stage once all the dialogue sequencing is finito
Working on this week’s playtest
I’ll release on Friday or Saturday
Letters are very small. I can hardly read them.