Zefyr: A Thief's Melody News

Hello there,

Another month has passed, and with it, a few improvements to the game and other stuff. Let’s start with…



Firstly, the saves are now encrypted, which prevents “easy cheating.” For example, manually editing the save files with a text editor to add unlimited ammo for the player. Now, the save files are encoded in binary after a basic cipher. While this won’t stop super hackers from doing what they want, it should deter a good percentage of cheaters.


I also took some time to upgrade the “Ocean Heart” level, adding vegetation, waterfalls, and various rewards. This is intended to be a bonus level that players have to discover themselves.



Now, for a BIG milestone: I’ve prepared the final build for the demo, which will be released on:

[h2]July 24th, 2023[/h2]

…during a Steam festival. Hopefully, this will generate more visibility and attract more people to discover the game. So mark your calendars for July 24th.



Lately, I’ve been focusing on improving communication, as it is crucial to spread the word. I now have an official “reveal” trailer that you can check out here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Next week, I plan to issue a press release to share it with the world. This should hopefully result in some press articles.

I’ve also submitted the game to two more video game festivals, although I haven’t been successful yet.

Finally, I’m still actively sharing my work on Reddit through ads and regular posts. One of my posts performed well in a Mexican subreddit. It really forces me to practice my Spanish.



As you may know, from time to time, I like to take a few days off working on smaller projects to test ideas and technologies. I have previously shared a few games I created in the past years:

• The Child Spirit: https://oneiricworlds.itch.io/the-child-spirit
• World of Ninjas: https://oneiricworlds.itch.io/world-of-ninjas
• Star Lady Fox: https://oneiricworlds.itch.io/star-lady-fox

This time, I participated in a game jam with the theme “Pepper & Carrot.” If you’re not familiar, it’s a free and open-source webcomic about a little witch and her cat created by David Revoy. You can check it out here: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/

The goal was to make a game set in the universe of the webcomic. I really wanted to focus on two main things:

• Achieving a “hand-painted” look
  
• Experimenting with new techniques for vegetation rendering that I could potentially use in my other games.
  

So here’s the final game if you’d like to give it a try (it’s better played with a gamepad): https://oneiricworlds.itch.io/pepper-carrot-potion-of-flight


And here’s what it looks like.

It’s completely free, but don’t expect too much from it as it was made in just one week.

And that’s all for this update.

Take care, peace!

Hello there!

It’s time for a quick game update! So, what’s new this month?




I have mainly focused on polishing various systems, including maps, dialogs, and some sounds:

• Maps: I have made significant improvements to the maps by handcrafting them. Previously, they were top-down renders, which looked cool but were not very understandable. Many meshes were overlapping, making it difficult for players to identify the platforms. Therefore, I took the time to design the maps manually for each level of the demo. I hope this has made them much more readable. Additionally, I have also reworked the icons, avatars, and map borders. Check it out:
  

Maps showing 2 floors of the same level.

• Dialogs: to make the texts and dialogs more engaging, I integrated a third-party library called “Text Animator for Unity” (https://www.febucci.com/text-animator-unity/). I initially had a custom-made system to display letters one by one, and I started exploring how to dynamically add shaking, growing, or shrinking effects. However, as I delved deeper into it, I realized that coding it correctly would take quite some time. Therefore, I opted for an existing library that already offers these functionalities. This has improved the dialog box and I have also reworked the speech bubbles that appear when characters speak. Additionally, I added interjections, especially when the player jumps.
  

Little interjections to give a bit more life to the character.

• Sound Design: I have continued working on sound design, focusing this time on animal sounds such as ducks, cats, dogs, fennec foxes, and sheep. I have also worked on item sounds for doors, chests, arrow blocks, and cannons.
  

OK, with all these improvements plus working on the content of the 1st chapter, I can finally see the finish line for the demo release. In fact…

[h2]I plan to release the demo in July.[/h2]

I have just completed a “release candidate” build and will start sharing keys for people to test. So stay tuned for the upcoming announcements! It’s a significant achievement for me after all these years to finally be able to consider a part of the game “DONE.” Of course, there will be bugs and things to fix, but in terms of content, intention, and quality, I believe it’s all there… (for the demo, of course, not for the final game).
Some new content: a species of flower.

Very soon, you will be able to tell all your friends, “Go check out this crazy indie dev” if you want to spread the word, of course 🙂

As for the rest of the game, another tester has completed it (making a total of 4 people, including myself). There is still a lot to correct and fix, but I am gradually bringing it up to the quality level of the demo.

The first playable version of the home island from 2014.
Final version of the home island. And yes, now you can see all the other islands in the world. Quite some progress!




Regarding the marketing, here are two main updates:

• First, I tried running Reddit ads, and the results are quite interesting. It has gradually increased the number of wishlists, so I think I’ll continue with this strategy and work on optimizing the process.
  
• Secondly, I have created a Discord server as some people have requested. Here’s the link if you want to join: https://discord.gg/bPnUzNrjyd. However, there isn’t much to do or see on it at the moment. I’ll use it to share important news and updates, of course.
  

And, as always, I’ve been focusing on bug fixes and code cleaning. I won’t bore you with the details.

I hope you found this update interesting. As always, thank you so much for your support and patience, and I’ll see you next month!


Take care and peace!

Hello there,

Welcome to the April update! What’s new this month?

[h2]Ocean Gameplay[/h2]
I’ve been working on the ocean gameplay and now, the waves have a real influence on the gameplay! The turtle can move up and down waves and I have also added the ability to jump. This makes the controls more inline with the character and feels pretty cool. Additionally, there are crates floating in the ocean that we can destroy to get bonuses.

It wasn’t an easy task to set up, as I had to rewrite all the water detection code to make it compliant with the physics engine. So now, the water code is computed in CPU for collision and GPU for rendering, and the two versions must behave exactly the same. It was also challenging to set up real-time NON-PLANAR reflection (due to waves).

Here’s a video of the latest version of the ocean gameplay:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Non-Playable Characters[/h2]
I have worked on a few NPCs, including 3D models, texturing, animation, and 2D avatars for dialogues. Here are a few screenshots:


Work in progress, of course; there are still many other ones to work on.


[h2]New Dojo Selection Screen[/h2]
I spent some time designing a more interesting dojo selection screen. One big problem in my game was that the player collected gems but without really knowing why. Now, the first time the player enters a dojo, she can get a glimpse of what’s coming up and how much it’s going to cost. This gives good motivation to collect gems (but there are other cool things to buy, of course).



[h2]Sound Design[/h2]
I finally started to work seriously on sound design, beginning with the main character. Now, there are sounds for footsteps, jump, roll, attack, landing, slide, and climbing. There are subtle variations (pitch, volume, audio source) on each occurrence to not annoy the player on the long run.


[h2]Communication[/h2]
I’ve entered a few more festival selections in order to showcase the game on Steam. Sadly, I had quite a few rejections (as for now, I’ve applied to 15 festivals and was only accepted to 1). It’s kind of hard for motivation, but I’ll keep applying. Luckily, what I’ve been sharing on Reddit had some great traction and feedback until now, as you can see here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/VideojuegosMX/comments/12forie/hola_a_todas_y_todos_les_comparto_un_fragmento/?utm_source=embedv2&utm_medium=post_embed&utm_content=post_title

https://www.reddit.com/r/jeuxvideo/comments/121g9su/jessaie_dam%C3%A9liorer_le_rendu_de_loc%C3%A9an_dans_mon/?utm_source=embedv2&utm_medium=post_embed&utm_content=post_title

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/128g1sq/update_of_the_ocean_big_3d_waves_geometrical_foam/?utm_source=embedv2&utm_medium=post_embed&utm_content=post_title

This is cheering me up 🙂

And yes, I try to post in English, French, and Spanish. Not that easy…

I’ve also shared a (French) tutorial video about how I coded the translation system in my games, and you can check it out on my YouTube channel here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Fixes & Improvements[/h2]
As usual, I’m still improving puzzles, fixing bugs here and there, and reworking on code structure, factorizing, and removing useless dependencies.

And that’s it for this month!

As always, thanks a lot for your interest and support!


Peace 🙂

Hello everyone,

Yes, I’m trying to post a bit more regularly these days. I hope I’ll stick to it. So here’s the summary of what I did this month:


As I had some friends test the game, I had to rework the save system. When something went wrong during testing, the save file became corrupted, so I needed a way to fix it so that players could keep playing on the next session. I migrated the old binary save system to a newer and more flexible one without breaking the current tester saves. Now, it’s based on textual JSON, which is easy to update and debug, and surprisingly faster than the old system. Of course, I’ll have to encrypt it when releasing the game.


After this big (and quite invisible to the player) technical part, I wanted to “rest” a little bit, and I started to work on something very fun & visible: the ocean. It’s been years since I last worked on it (check this 10-YEAR-OLD previous post), and with the feedback of players and internet comments, I decided to add geometrical waves to it. Until now, it was perfectly flat, even if there were a few normal maps.

So I became a “tech artist” for a few days, and I added many improvements to the waves:

• vertex displacement with various layers of movement
  
• color variations
  
• moving foam on the ocean surface
  
• splashing foam at the wave top
  
• little particle splashes on top of waves too (I had to code a 3D gradient ascent to put them in good places)
  
• hue variation based on a fake depth (super useful for the design of one level particularly)
  
• sparkles reacting to bloom on certain angles reflecting the moon or the sun
  

I wanted the ocean to be gorgeous, and to call the player for exploration, because it’s a big selling point of the game! And here’s how it looks like now:


The Ocean at night


The Ocean at dawn

And here it is in motion:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

But I had 2 main constraints:

• at the moment, I dont want to rewrite all the gameplay moves on the ocean, so I had to make it visually interesting without breaking the existing gameplay code
  
• the world is cyclic, which means the ocean has to be continuous from one map edge to the other. Indeed, the player “teleports” from one side of the map to the other when she gets out of it, and the ocean MUST be tilable so that the teleport can’t be spotted. This involves using smart texture & mask scaling to hide the trick, but also hide obvious repetitions.
  

While working on the ocean, I also took the time to remove the black outline on the foam and later on all visual effects. That was disturbing and didn’t match the art direction for the game. But I had to set up a different render stack for the whole game. I think it’s for the better in the end.


Following the previous post, I created a trailer for the game prologue. This time, I composed the music first, thinking about what would appear in the trailer. I think it’s a better approach, and the final video is now available on the Steam prologue page, or here below:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Sadly, I worked on the ocean AFTER the trailer, so it’s the old version that we can see in it. Anyways, I’ll have to update the trailer one day or the other…


While testing the game, I corrected many things, including bugs, dialogs, level design, and puzzle design.

That’s it for this month! I hope this was interesting.

Peace 🙂

Hello everyone!

For once, it hasn’t been that long since the last blog post! Yay!
So what’s new since last time ?


[h2]Tests[/h2]
I’m still testing the full game with a few people. I’ve been correcting some soft-locks, too-hard puzzles, missing dialogs and explanations, I’ve improved mission descriptions… The game is better with each test, but not polished enough yet. Plus it still lacks all the secondary content.


[h2]UI (User Interface) upgrade[/h2]
I wasn’t very satisfied with it, like if the style was a bit off with the rest of the game. So I tried various stuff and ended with the following. I’m still working on it, but I’ve upgraded the title screen, the menus, and the dialogs. I still need to work on the in-game inventory though. I also added a few sound effects, and tested the UI with a keyboard, a mouse and a controller to check nothing conflicts.


New dialog box


More colorful and detailed title screen.


Option menu (Graphics).


[h2]Video[/h2]
I worked on few 3D assets, among which a directional wood sign to help the player locates herself. I made a little tutorial video from it (in French):
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Marketing[/h2]
I created 2D assets for a prologue page on Steam. Basically it’s a free (but limited) version of the game (somehow like a demo). It helps spreading the game around a bit more. I also submitted the game to some festivals. Hopefully, I’ll get accepted in a few of them.


[h2]Steam[/h2]
I uploaded my first builds on it, and I started to implement the Steam API (useful for achievements for example). A friend tested the game on the Steam Deck, and it seems quite compatible already, but might need a bit more optimization.


Ho yeah.


And that’s it for the (main) latest news.

As always, thanks a lot for your support!
See you soon for the next one.

Peace!