Hey everyone! Judge Heath here, Ursa is normally the one to write these, but given the chaos of the last year and the last month in particular, he’s taking a break to focus on getting the code back on track. In future, these will be written by our new Project Manager, Onion Volcano.
2023 was a rough year no doubt. Our entire original programming team besides Ursa left the team for various reasons. Our plans for development were put on pause while we diverted resources and time towards hiring and training a new team. By mid-summer, we had Norimoo, Neuropa, and Dofi on the team, and were making amazing headway with new eyes and fresh ideas to tackle challenges that came to us.
However, that didn’t stop things from being rough of course: various real life events, including Spurple being hospitalized after a car accident (he is expected to make a full recovery), affected our progress significantly during the past year. Shortly after, we expanded the Art department to include a new background and environment artist, Immunity, while Nedo took the reins of the art department. Together, with Immunity, they started making massive strides refining the second forest floor and with the revisions for floors 1-3 of the savannah. And while it didn’t effect our pipeline nearly as much, we did end up losing Crom from our artists, and Johnny Law from our writers, while welcoming on Togari as a new writer.
At the end of the year the team expanded a final time with us hiring first Rimmo to be our technical artist and asset integrator. With this hiring, we removed a massive logjam in our art-to-development implementation pipeline. During this time, we also hired OnionVolcano, our new Producer and Project Manager, who will be taking over for me now so that I can step back and focus my efforts more on the game design side of things.
2023 was rough for us, yes, but we’ve come out of it wiser, stronger, and better able to handle issues in the future. So let’s look at what we did accomplish during this year! today’s post is going to be about looking back on the year of 2023, and giving all of you an idea of how far we’ve come and what is on the horizon!
Going department by department, I’ve listed out what has been added to the game, and you’ll see some pretty fantastic additions when taken as a whole!
ArtOn the art side of things we massively expanded our work on the dialogue sprites for various npcs across the map, revised savannah floors 1-3, and gave Katarina Station an entirely new look to prepare it for its expansion as a quest hub!
- Dialogue Sprites
- Work on full body dialogue sprites
- Work on expressions
- Dungeon and Floor Content
- Forest Floor 1 and 2 work
- Savannah Floor 1-3 Redux Work
- Tro’s Lab
- Katarina Station
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ProgrammingProgramming has had the most tumultuous year of the various departments, having to go through so much change and transition. However, they still covered incredible ground despite the challenges involved. While not easily summarized, here is a list of notable additions and work completed!
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- Major
- Fairegrounds & Brownie Caravan event, sex scenes
- Magical saturation system
- New enemy wolf units
- New enemy holstaur units
- Combat Ability skill ranks
- Dungeon Fast Travel
- Katarina Station visual overhaul + preparing for quest hub
- Monster migration system
- New enemy pirate units
- Minor
- Stackable equipment
- New farm action icons
- Camellia & Jaero combat balancing
- Numerous fixes to keybinding, NPC interactions, farming, UI, combat, sprites/outlines
- Calendar & events system reworked
- New Cave environment music varieties
- Enemy combat mob balancing
- Performance & memory improvements for dungeons, town scenes, town events
- 64-Bit Version of the game made available.
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AnimationOf all our departments, the Animation department has had the smoothest sailing; managing to get far ahead of their set milestones. The groundwork was laid for more HD Sex Scenes, as well as various world sprite animations (including those found in the Brownie Caravan.)
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- Minerva HD Content
- Sieger HD Content
- Orchid HD Content
- Kellam HD Content
- Lots of Combat and HD Animation Fixes to make them run smoother and nicer such as the Market Day Stalls
- Travel System Animations
- Town idle assets for various characters.
- Ev Sleeping Animations for different places:
- Dungeon and Combat Assets for Forest Floor and other areas
- Tro’s Lab Animations
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WritingOn the writing side of things we’ve seen enormous improvement across the board. The writing team expanded the number of written sex scenes and sprite sex animations that lacked a written component. Entirely new characters were penned, and several events and story segments were completed. In addition multiple areas of the content have been written out and are awaiting implementation currently.
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- Completed and Implemented
- Brownie Caravan Update: The Writing team completed the Brownie Caravan update, introducing several new characters and eight new sex scenes and a number of minor sex scenes. We are confident this this major content update will provide a number of fun interactions for players to take a break during their busy schedule of farming and fighting.
- Completed and in the process of being implemented
- Arc 2 Opening Quest Line
- Kiram Recruitment
- Forest Isle Content for floors 1 and 2
- Various Romance and Date Dialogues.
- Various sex scene written segments
At the end of last year S-Purple had a serious accident resulting in his hospitalization, while he is expected to make a full recovery, it still left us in a lurch with our plans, which was to focus on finishing off Forest Floors 2 and 3 and continue implementation. As Forest Floor 2 was only partially complete, and Floor 3 only designed, there was no question we needed to change priorities on our roadmap.
Much of January has been spent reorganizing the team (to integrate new leadership and staff), and get early planning and revisions done to continue forging ahead.
While the full extent of changes will be announced at a later date, for the time being our plans are to focus on the scenarios and backend systems which are nearly asset complete. We look forward to sharing more details for revamps of Tro’s lab, and Savannah Floors 1-3. After the new development team has cut their teeth on these revamps, we plan to dive headfirst into continuing the development of content for the forest isles, Companion social links, and more!
Below you’ll find a full list of our future plans along with some samples of the work already done for them!
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- Focus on revising the savannah floors 1-3 to make them more engaging and better able to onboard new players
- New Quest system and greatly expanded quest content, making the floors more alive, and less a simple pretty painting you walk through.
- Tutorialization of basic game concepts such as farming, breeding, and cooking.
- Back End Improvements and new UI for the Quest System.
- Kiram NPC Combat unit
- Story Arc II intro sequences
- Inventory UI performance improvements
- Sex scene unlock hints system
- Quest system overhaul + preparing for quest hub
- Tro's Lab overhaul
- UI & combat sound FX
- NPC Barks both for normal NPCs and party members
- Companion Social Links
If you have any questions we are always readily available in the following places:
