Zefyr: A Thief's Melody News

Hello everyone!

Today I've release the Prologue version of Zefyr.
As a reminder, the prologue is free and contains the first chapter of the game "Zefyr: A Thief's Melody". It's the same as the demo, but it reaches a different audience on Steam, so it's an opportunity to make more people discover the game. The full game is not released yet, but should arrive on Q4 2024 🤞.

As I'm a super small & totally unknown solo dev, I really need all the help I can get! If you want to support me you can:
[h2]👉 Play the prologue and leave a review[/h2]
You can check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2320250/Zefyr_Prologue/
Even a simple review like "yes" will do the trick. The more reviews, the more visible the prologue will be steam, and hopefully more players will be interested in the full game.

[h3]🙏 Thanks A LOT for your help 🙏[/h3]

Happy gaming, take care, peace!

Hello everyone!

I hope you’re all doing well. This month has been packed with updates and improvements to Zefyr, and I’m excited to share them with you. Here’s what I’ve been working on:




Now there are Steam Achievements for the prologue, the demo, and the full game. I’ve built and deployed the prologue version on Steam, and updated the demo with the latest fixes. I’ve also written a Steam post stating the Deck Compatibility.

[h2]AND HERE’S THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:
THE PROLOGUE WILL RELEASE ON JULY 22ND![/h2]

Check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2320250/Zefyr_Prologue/

In case you don’t know, the prologue is a free version of a game. In my case, it’s the exact same thing as the demo but it reaches a different audience on Steam. If you want to help me, the best way is to play the (free) prologue on the release day and leave a review! This helps a lot for the visibility of my game.




I’ve mainly polished the 3rd chapter:

• Villa Level: I’ve added details to the kitchen, bathroom, and more cushions and furniture. There’s also a cute cat roaming around now!
  
• Green Island: added towers, rocks, stone walls, and hidden rewards.
  
• Mines: Designed a specific font for text and used it on screens and panels. I’ve also added buckets, picks, and wires to enrich the environment.
  
• Robot Factory: Enhanced with stencils, screens, wires, and improved ambiance to give it a more industrial feel.
  
• Aeolia Island: more flowers to make the world vibrant and colorful, better stone placement, more vegetation.
  

A few screens:



To balance gameplay, eating 3 chocolates now grants 1 additional heart. This allows to place more rewards in levels without overpowering the player. Plus it gives a good feeling of progression.




I’ve been wanting to redesign the link UI for a while now, (some people have been asking for it). So here it is:

• UI Overhaul: There’s now a new, more intuitive tab-based navigation.
  
• Status: Added a new status page that shows the game main items to unlock.
  
• Help: Improved the help section for better player guidance.
  
• Animals: Added detailed descriptions for all animals in the game.
  
• Maps: I’ve also updated the rendering of maps, with shaders and outlines to ensure visual consistency and readability. It took quite some time to fix all the rendering bugs due to projection maths for the clip planes.
  
• Avatars: The flute avatar has been tweaked to distinguish it from the bo staff, and avatars for certain bosses have been updated.
  

Here’s how it look like:




I’ve developed a new mesh generator tool to speed up the creation of vegetation. This tool allows me to generate detailed and varied plant life much faster, enhancing the level design processing significantly (from 20 mn to 10 s on some levels). Plus it’s lighter on memory so it doesn’t crash anymore on super dense levels. What a breeze!




Lots of bug fixes, among which:

• Resolved issues with instantiating two map cameras
  
• Fixed lots of glitched click and select functions
  
• Optimized the UI for better performance and resolved button overlap issues
  
• Tested the UI from 5:4 screen ratio to 21:9 to ensure compatibility across different screen sizes
  
• Level Design: made numerous small fixes to improve overall level design
  

That’s all for this month! Thank you for your continued support and patience. Stay tuned for more updates, and take care!

Peace!

Hello everyone! I hope you’re doing well.
I’ve been working a lot to improve Zefyr, and this month’s update is pretty huge.




[h2]Levels[/h2]
First, I took some time to rework some pretty old levels. They were functional but a bit empty and rough around the edges. I mainly worked on a mansion, a snowy tower, and a pirate chase (no precise names to avoid spoilers). I added grass, trees, ivy, rocks, lights, benches, dialogues, paths, animals, and various other details. I also fixed lots of little bugs and reworked some cutscenes (positioning, behaviors, missing elements). I can’t describe everything, but here are a few screens:

Some improved environments…

[h2]Items & Gameplay Elements[/h2]
I improved the grapple and the magnetic bow. Now, there are little particles and nice sounds when you use them. I hope it’s easier to read and understand too. The magnetic bow now uses the climb/magnetic energy instead of separate ammo, which makes level design easier and is much more forgiving for the player. I added various FX & SFX (bosses, weapons, camera placement on explosions, rock breaks, …)

The magnetic arrows bounce off walls with many visual fxs.

The grapple now has this violet/purple translucent look which is consistent with all the magnetic item/weapons.

I had to design logos and visual identities for the game various events/enterprises.

Breaking rocks is not that easy to code; you have to take into account the volume and orientation of the base shape to generate smaller stones.

[h2]UI[/h2]
I integrated some UI effects, including particles and sounds when you gain life or money and when you move around the menus. There are also background particles to bring life to the interface and a custom cursor for the mouse.

[h2]Optimization & Steam Deck[/h2]
I spent quite some time optimizing dynamic loading times in the open world. It’s not perfect but much better than it was. This enabled me to re-test the game on Steam Deck, and it works pretty well with good quality! I also rechecked all the font sizes (not too small) so that I could ask Steam to get officially validated for Steam Deck. Sadly, it seems I’m too small for them to review and stamp the game.

[h2]Rewriting Code[/h2]
While optimizing, I also cleaned the tag system and integrated the localization of controls (which is a 3rd party library) into my main localization system. It’s much easier to support now!

[h2]Audio[/h2]
On top of working on various sound effects for items, characters, and gameplay elements, I set up a centralized audio system to avoid the annoying comb effect when the same sound is launched multiple times at the same moment (or too close in time). But this forced me to decouple sounds from the visual effects. Still a work in progress.

[h2]Options & Menus[/h2]
As I optimized the game, I added several options regarding performance and other aspects:

• FPS target
  
• Full screen vs. windowed support
  
• Changed the dropdown menus to simpler buttons, which are easier to navigate
  
• Controls now have 2 categories, with hopefully more intuitive settings regarding axis inversions
  
• Option to disable step echo
  
• The item wheel selection is now easier to navigate from both joypad and keyboard/mouse
  
• Better help display
  
• Menus are navigable with the d-pad
  

Various graphical options.

With all these new features, I updated the demo on Steam.


[h2]II – Marketing[/h2]

As usual, I still struggle with marketing. However, I applied to the Indie Cup, the OTK Pixel Pitch, and the Jump High festival. I also entered the Steam Autumn Festival with the Zefyr demo. Hopefully, these will bring some visibility to the game.

I also tried to post more often on my social media (Twitter, BlueSky, Threads, Discord) and even reached out to streamers/players on Twitter, but without any success for now.

And that’s it for now!

Hello there !

Here come the latest news ! Last month I essentially spent my time on 3 subjects:


[h2]I – Marketing[/h2]

And yes, you know it now, I force myself to spend more time on marketing… and boy is it difficult. I tried to optimize my reddit ads, but I was disappointed in the results. It seems the longer the ads run, the lower the conversion rates. So I tried to go back to organic posts. One did quite well on r/pcgaming:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1byxmvv/hi_ive_been_working_solo_on_zefyr_a_thiefs_melody/

I also took the time to apply to 4 festivals for this summer. Sadly, I received negative answers from the last ones I applied too. A bit harsh for the moral.

On the Steam side, I built and fixed my full game and the prologue version too to have them validated by Steam, and they were accepted ! I have officially passed the Steam quality test. From now on, I shouldn’t be annoyed with the process anymore. I also reworked the tags for the Steam pages. It seems to perform OK for the prologue but not that much for the full game. People don’t discover it on Steam. But the prologue is free, so I guess this can influence things.

Finally, I kept mailing streamers, but no luck this time.
However, one streamer from my previous contacts tried my game and interviewed me! He was super nice and it was a pleasure to answer his questions. You can check out the interview (in French) if you want to know more about how I work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFKFDEz1bLs

So in the end, a bit of a depressing month for the marketing except for the reddit post & the interview.


[h2]II – Mini Game[/h2]

Last month, we had holidays here in France, and with the kids at home, it’s always a bit difficult for me to work fully on the game. So I worked on a small project that I called Lantern Island. It’s a small wholesome game where you play as Maya, a young girl trying to save the lantern festival on a nice cosy island. It’s supposed to be somewhere between “A short hike” & “alba”. This is one of these “small games” I occasionally try to create to test myself. I think I’ll release this one when it’ll be more polished. Here are a few screens:


I had to work on many NPCs and animals too. I’ll add these back into Zefyr, so that I kill two birds with one stone.
And I took the time to code the famous “pet the dog” interaction. Speaking of which…


[h2]III – Zefyr[/h2]

Yes, I also worked a bit on the game itself. Here are a few improvements:

• I reused the “pet the dog” code from Lantern Island. You can now pet the dog in Zefyr too. Even if it’s more of a fennec fox actually.
  
• Descriptions for all inventory objects
  
• New footstep sound visual FX, hopefully less annoying
  
• Shadow under the character when jumping to help for precise landing
  

And that’s it for this month. As usual, thanks a lot for your support & patience !
Take care!

Hello there,

Here’s the usual update of the last month(es). I mainly worked on NPC & marketing during January & February.




During the past weeks, I upgraded my old placeholders for the NPC (the characters you’ll have to interact with in the game). For each NPC, I need to work on:

• Visual design: I usually start with doodles on my sketch book. I try to also get an idea of the basic color scheme.
  
• 3D Modelisation: I tend to reuse old model parts if possible (hands for example)
  
• Texturing: I paint the textures in Blender and/or Krita and map them on the character
  
• Rigging (creating the skeleton): I almost always start from another skeleton that I copy and scale/adapt to the new character morphology. I might encounter difficulties for the clothes especially (be sure they dont collide with the limbs for example). Some designs are more exotic than others regarding this point, and it might be a difficult problem to solve.
  
• Animation : I create at least one idle animation, and usually 1 or 2 more (speak, variations of movements, …)
  
• Integration in the game: I have to put the NPC in the game, and be sure that evertything loads & links correctly
  
• Coding the presence logic: depending on time and actions done by the player, the NPC are not at the same place at the same moment.
  
• Coding the dialog logic: depending on your actions, the character won’t say the same things. They can also create new quests or complete some. They can add items to the inventory, change story key points, …
  
• Dialog & names localization: for each line, I have to translate it in French and English.
  
• Avatar: I have to paint a 2D version of the character that will show in the dialog UI.
  
• Now that I have all my workflow and tools set up, it generally takes between a few days and two weeks of work for each character, depending on the complexity and originality. This doesn’t include the debug of course. I sometimes find problems much later.
  

So in the end, I added/polished 8 NPC. Here are a few screens:


There are still other ones to create of course, but it’s starting to be nice.




Regarding the marketing:

• I still work on reddit ads. They bring some regular visits to the Steam page.
  
• I started to contact streamers (youtube/twitch) to market the demo. I had to update my presskit with recent screens & logos. I reached out to 50 people, but it only ended up with a few videos. However, they are really nice (like this one, or this one (in French) for example) and the streamers were happy with the game. I need to keep on working on this.
  
• Finally, I keep on trying to enter festivals. I recently took part in the Ninja & Pirates festival on Steam, but it wasn’t that successful for me. I also applied to the Cozy Family, WASD Curios & the Mix. We’ll see what comes out of it.
  

Not a lot to signal here. Mainly:

• arrow collision fix (this was a tough one, I couldn’t replicate it on my PC, so a big thanks to “Les Indés Primés” channel for helping me)
  
• now saves in turtle mode
  
• a few textures fixes here and there
  

This allowed me update the demo on Steam.

And that’s it ! The game is improving little by little. As usual, thanks a lot for your support and patience.

Take care