Zefyr: A Thief's Melody News

Hi there!

September has passed, and it’s time for a little summary. What’s new this month?




I’m still focusing on marketing with ads on Reddit and festival applications. The ads are yielding some results, and I’ve reached 3000 wishlists for the game. It’s not bad, but if I want the game to have a chance to succeed, I must aim for at least 10,000 wishlists. So, there’s still a lot of work to do!

I’ve also spent some time tracking similar games that streamers have played in the last few months to reach out to them. Hopefully, this should happen in the next few weeks.

Luckily, since the demo came out, some streamers spontaneously played the game (here, here, here or here), and were quite positive. However, it didn’t reach a super large audience. Nonetheless, it’s always comforting to see people play and enjoy my game!






And now, a little surprise! This summer, I took a detour from Zefyr and worked on some small projects (as I usually do during holidays). This time, I worked on “Splash Kids”, a co-op game about my family recoloring a gray city and fighting the Zombie-pocalypse. It’s a mix of Splatoon and Zombies Kids. I created this game as a gift for my (numerous) nephews. It was a lot of fun to work on and allowed me to experiment with new techniques and systems:

• A customizable avatar generation system
  
• General-purpose GPU computing (GP-GPU) for map coloring
  
• Custom GPU instancing with tweening shader animation for vegetation
  

This was super interesting from a technical perspective, and I believe the final game was well-received. It’s completely free, and you can check it out here: https://oneiricworlds.itch.io/family




Over the past few weeks, I’ve been conducting classes on Game Design and Level Design. Consequently, progress on Zefyr has slowed down a bit. However, during this time, I dedicated some effort to develop a tool to enhance and streamline level design. I’m not entirely certain about its potential, as the mathematical aspects are more complex than expected. Nevertheless, I sense some promising possibilities.

Here’s the idea: envision something like Townscraper, but with the ability to control the base grid. Artists can provide simple, independent 3D tiles for the level designer to swiftly paint a semi-procedural 3D city (or any kind of level actually). This could be useful for rapid prototyping (which I’ve noticed consumes a lot of my time). While I think similar tools exist for regular quad grids, there’s a gap for completely customizable topologies. If this tool proves successful, I’ll use it for many of my projects, and hopefully, others can benefit from it as well.

Currently, it’s in a very early stage, quite rudimentary, buggy, and not very intuitive. Nonetheless, here’s a glimpse of what it looks like:


Roads (main topology lines) are built from a flowmap (or tensor field for math people) that the user can manually draw


Automatic quadrangulation/triangulation for concav inner parts. Far from perfect, but we’ll get there.

And that concludes this month’s update. As always, thank you immensely for your ongoing support! If you want to support me financially (if you don’t already) you can check out my Patreon. Thanks a loooooot !

Catch you soon and take care! Peace!

Hello there,

It’s been 2 months since the last post, and I must be honest, it has mainly been due to the holidays! However, I took some time to work on two main things:


[h2]Patreon[/h2]

I reworked my Patreon page. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a platform to financially help creators (artists, musicians, youtubers, … you name it). Over the years I had a few supporters, and recently, I reevaluated the tiers and rewards because I realized that my backers don’t actually claim the rewards. I guess they are more here to support my work and my vision. So thanks a lot for that, guys and girls. I also removed the physical goods because it doesn’t align with my values (I don’t want to encourage consumption, especially in today’s world).

So here it is:
I made a few paintings of different “guardians” to update the page. And by the way, if you want to support my work, don’t hesitate to subscribe ! Thanks a lot !


[h2]Steam Festivals[/h2]

During the summer, I also took part in 2 Steam festivals: the Steam Stealth Festival and the Dreamhack Beyond week. It helped me spread the game a bit more, but sadly, it wasn’t a huge success either. So I’ll have to keep on marketing the game through other means. I’ll count on you more than ever to spread the word to your gamer friends!

It was quite cool to see my game between the awesome Tomb Raider & Batman.

Anyways, that’s it for the summer months. Next, I’ll work on polishing the last part of the game and continue with marketing.

Have a great day, and stay tuned for next month when I’ll share a little surprise.

Peace!

Yaaaaaaaay! 🎉🎉🎉

Here it is! Finally! The demo of Zefyr: A Thief's Melody is now available on the Steam Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1344990

I really hope you'll like it! I've been working on the game for a decade, pouring my heart and soul into this project. It's not perfect, of course, as there are still a few things I need to polish here and there, but it's quite close to the final state.

If you want to spread the news, you can retweet this:
https://twitter.com/oneiricworlds/status/1683458751490039809

Of course, you can also stream it or share it with the world on your social media. Feel free to ask your favorite YouTuber or Twitch streamer to play it, or even write an article on Reddit. Any idea is welcome and any help in spreading the news will be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot!

Thank you so much for your kind support and patience too.

And that's all for this short, but super important news!

Take care.

PS: for now, only French and English are available in the demo.

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!