(The post was originally published here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/38749432)

Hi everyone! ^w^

I hope you all had a nice week end and a good start into the week!

Poll

The poll is still up for 1 hour!! It is a really close call between the flight instructor and the berry beer vendor! If you haven't voted yet, now is your last chance! ^w~

Vote here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/38534629 

Dev Stream

Tomorrow I will be doing our next private dev stream! Hang out in a call with me and watch me work on sexy sketches for the poll winner.

The time is 9:00 PST / 11:00 CST / 18:00 CEST

More Characters added to the village!

I still had some NPCs left that I didn't manage to finish before the build got released so I wrapped up my work on them.

Chieftain

First of all, we have the very lovely village chieftain!

I wrote a more detailled post on how Null and I go about designing characters. You can read it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/38747408 

Shaman

We still liked the idea of colored kobolds and wanted to find a way to bring them back into the game. One of our ideas was to make the shaman of the village an albino. But whatever we tried, they always ended up looking like a sorceress!

We really liked her design, though, so they might make an appearance in some other way, shape or form! For now, this design is *rejected* though.

So we went back to some of the other ideas we had and tried to bring in some of the elements we liked from the rejected design.

I iterated on the design more and more until we narrowed it down to what we think is going to be her final design:

Guards & Villagers

To make the village look a bit more lively we need a bunch more people standing and walking around the important hotspots of the area.

There will be guards and villagers and most of them will say a few story or lore tidbits here and there to add to the lively village athmosphere, similar to how JRPGs handle this sort of stuff!

Idle animations for everyone

The village would look static and lifeless without some animations so I also made a short idle for all characters that needed them. Here are some examples!

I always find idle animations a bit weird and hard to make, especially in lower resolutions. I hope I was able to find a type isn't too busy and odd looking!

"Kincaid Fully Decked Out" Prototype

On the code side of things, Null is hard at work at an internal prototype focusing on the remaining abilities we think Kincaid is going to have in the final game.

The idea is that once we know what Kincaid plays and feels like at the final stages of the gameplay, we can then go back and design the world proper around our chosen ability progression.

Up until now, all the levels and areas have been produced "to order", to fit what was currently being worked on. So in the current demo, you get the double jump quite early. But that doesn't really make sense if you also want to have things like, for instance, a dash. A double jump opens up way more world to the player than a dash, so it would be better for the double jump to be acquired a bit later in the game, and the dash a bit earlier.

Once the prototype is done, we will show you guys what we came up with to get a final round of feedback. Once we think Kincaid is in a good spot in terms of abilities and gamefeel, most, if not all, of the current world is going to get scrapped and completely revised to fit the story and game progression.

And at that point we're way on our way to wrapping up the first planet!

At this point, all the major systems and abilities are in the game and our focus shifts to things like her ship, showing more about the story and developing the remaining planets until the game is complete.

Making a non-linear game in what essentially is "early access" is a bit of a challenge, but I think the approach we came up with worked very well!

GameMaker 2.3 Beta got released

GameMaker, the engine we are using for Kincaid, just received a big update which is still in Beta!

Null checked it out to see if upgrading to it makes sense for us. After a quick evaluation we think the new features are interesting, for sure, but for now we will stick with the version we started out in to avoid introducing unnecessary bugs and hiccups!

Until next week! Cookie