July 2021 Development Update

Our update for July will be fairly small, as we got pretty distracted this month with playing video games instead of making them - _ - That said, we still have a few updates to get you by until the next monthly report!

Crafting Fix

While the crafting system is still not finalized, it's one of our Top Priorities for the game at the moment, and we have made progress on it since our last report. Remember that glitch where clicking on a crafting recipe would generate the item associated with the previous crafting recipe you clicked on? Well, no longer! Now you actually craft the item that you tell the game to craft!

(This might seem like a small thing, but it took me forever to find the cause of the problem, so I'm feeling pretty proud of figuring this one out.)

Interaction Icons

To better indicate when you can interact with the world of deadland, we've added interaction icons that pop up over your PC's head to indicate that an interaction is possible. These little animations should help players more easily navigate through the game.

Tree Design Re Design?

I've been playing around with a reworking of the style for trees and other flora in the game. My original approach was to utilize spray brushes to get the leafy effect, but this created problems in meshing visually with the rest of the game's aesthetic, which utilizes outlines. In order to get the plantlife of deadland to vibe better with this, I've been toying around with new approaches to trees that still get that good pixel-y detail without deviating from the style of the rest of the assets in the game. I haven't fully committed to this switch yet, but I'm seeing what kind of effect I can get with a more solid-looking plant.

Aesthetic Themes

I've also been trying to get some solid prototypes of various game buildings in their themed forms. This takes forever because I get bogged down in the details even with rough concept assets like this, but I have been able to at least put together a decent example of what I have in mind for the Dark Gothic theme that will be present in the game, showcased with the Homestead building:

Theoretically, each building type can be re-skinned to one of several aesthetic themes. All it will take is for me to create assets for each building type--each one facing two possible directions--and for all of those to have roughly a dozen theme variants. So this aspect of the game is a good long while from actually being implemented, but I do want to start on building a strong visual sense for each of the themes.

For Next Month

Our plan for August is to really hammer out what all we need to put together a playable demo and get ourselves on a proper timeline with that. We will, of course, be focusing hard on the programmatic aspects of the game, which is much harder to actually post about, so even if we manage to be successful in our endeavors, expect next month's update to be brief, as well. We've also been scaling back our social media use because, again, with our focus narrowing on programming, we have a lot less sharable content to post on those accounts. That said, you can still find us on TikTok and Twitter. I will be doing another character profile later this month, as well, which will be posted here.

Anyway, that's all for July, and you should all play NEO The World Ends With You, it's a lot of fun and very distracting.