Hello everybody.  I know it's only been a week but it feels like it's been far longer.  Between Me, Bruno, and Ref, it seems like everyone's been busy so finding time to work on the project has been a challenge, but we're still making progress.  Full speed ahead!

Art

Ref has been doing some interesting stuff this week.  With the Elites for the demo complete, we've pivoted to making the bosses for the game.  We are currently working on the first one which happens to have a bit more move sets than other characters (including a transformation mid way through the fight) We're still in the discovery phase, figuring out how long bosses will take and what exactly we want from them, but we're starting to put a dent in his move set! 

For the first one we've created a massive grave keeper that hordes his tombstones.  Our inspirations were Yorick from League Of Legends, combined with some fancy artwork I found where the monster is so large it seems to have popped out from under multiple graves.  I like the combination and the planned transformation will definitely be fun!

Capsule art

From the side of Capsule Art it feels like we're making great progress.  Bruno has sent me a color palette mock up of the artwork to show the color layout and I think it looks incredible.  Lots of action and lighting going on and I'm happy with the results.  We've also has luck selecting a logo, although admittedly I've been far more neurotic about this part of the process.  It occurred to me that having a moon in the logo would be redundant when there is a moon in the capsule art so we had to scrap one of the designs and go with a simpler font as the logo.  Bruno was kind enough to supply 4 different styles to choose from and I think we have a winner  I'd rather just post when we have the final versions of these images so stay tuned! I think we will have the crisp finalized version soon!

Programming

On my end, I've identified another need through playtesting lately and that is for a better tutorial.  Up until now I've been using a tutorial system taken from Darkest Dungeon 2, where flash cards appear on screen to explain things to the player.  Unfortunately, I've seen through play testing that most players simply exit out of this and try to figure out the game for themselves, however, while this may work in a turn based game, where each turn you may feel like you're missing information and will consult the tutorial, it is inadequate in a combat heavy game with some mechanics that are not immediately obvious.  

As a result I did some research and decided to go with a tutorial system inspired by Balatro.  The goal is to have your abilities get locked, and as the match plays out, they are give to you one-by-one.  At the same time, an overlay appears that will explain a mechanic, and wait for the player to specifically interact with it before they can move forward.  The hope is to make this seemlessly built into the first round of the match, and once the player has done everything they need to do, the match simply continues along like a normal round

(as you can see here, only certain cards are placed above the overlay and can be interacted with. I intend to do the same with player UI and abilities)

In addition to getting this system up and running, I've also built multiple save slots into the game with delete and reset functionality.  This is something I've been meaning to do for a long time but finally got around to due to necessity.  Now I can delete the game and reset it from inside the game itself, which should make testing the tutorial (which pops up only in the first round) much easier!

Next week

The goal for next week is hopefully to have the first boss and get started on the next one for level 1.  This is a stretch, but if work settles down for us, it might be possible.  On the capsule art side, I'm hoping to have the finalized version ready by the end of the week or maybe the following one! From there it's just going to be the fun part which will be updating the Steam page and hoping to get it approved.

As for me, I'm going to just continue working on this tutorial system.  Hopefully I can finish it in one week and move on to polish or other ventures that have a bit more feedback because I'm definitely getting tired of making systems that are more back end maintenance stuff.  I can't wait to get back into adding juice to the gameplay loop!