Night Loops News

Welcome back~

We did a LOT this past month *exhale of relief*

[h3]「 Updated Demo 」[/h3]

We actually made a giant, fresh update to our demo to take part in Two and a Half Studios’ Storyteller’s Festival that was last week. Glad to finally get to show you some more polished gameplay and excited to hear what you think about it!

Here’s one of the graphics we put together for that event if you were curious ^-^



[h3]「 Controller Support 」[/h3]

Another thing we’ve been getting underway is controller support. So the full game will indeed work with controllers of all shapes and sizes. (The updated demo now currently supports PlayStation, Xbox, and other gamepad style controllers)

[h3]「 New Official Discord 」[/h3]

Last but not least, we’ve officially opened up our very own official Discord!! I’m hoping it’ll be a fun way to get to talk to everyone throughout the dev process and onwards~ Here’s the invite link:
https://discord.com/invite/jvaRf2Yz6S

Well that’s all for this month. I’ll be back for more in May! Also cannot believe it’s already Spring...

- J

P.S. if you played the older demo, the save data won’t be able to transfer over to this updated demo, since we’ve added quite a few new things (after a lot of thinking, we decided this is okay though since the demo is a relatively short experience and most fun when experienced from the beginning)

Hello~

So this past month I finished up adding… new NPC emotions! I wasn’t sure if I was going to do these, mainly since I didn't think it'd help the dialogue much, but I'm glad I took the time. I've been playing some VNs lately, so I guess you could say that was an inspiration. I actually do think they make quite the difference for the game's feel, and they make you as the writer think a lot harder about the specific emotions you're trying to convey. And how long you want to stay in one emotion.

Here’s a few examples, all the way from the concept stage…



And how it turned out:



That is all, more for next month!

- Jia

P.S. Realizing how each line for NPC dialogue tries to serve a very very very specific purpose, really different than real-life convo it seems

Hi again!

So some of this past month has been working with our publisher to take care of some logistical things, but besides that, we're mostly back to regular programming now. Which means I’m back with another monthly update!

The main update from this past month has been crafting some cut scenes like this in-game.





Hopefully these make a few important moments like when you first encounter a new area more memorable and hold more weight. I also thought it'd be pretty neat to observe the maps from different angles too.

Other updates include sifting through the dialogue and some story tweaking, so that’s a little hard to show you.

That's all for now, anyways I'll try to keep these short and sweet, you’ll hear from me again next month~

Sincerely,
Jia

Hey there~

For this new year I have some massive news to share! We’re incredibly proud to announce that Night Loops is now being published by Freedom Games (https://freedom.gg). There’s a ton that a game publisher can do much better than Estella, s3-z, and I could ever hope for alone, like taking care of a lot of the business and marketing side of releasing a game. That includes managing our store pages, marketing and advertising the game, helping showcase the game at both digital and live events, PR, and a lot more. Really it lets us totally focus on working to make the game the best it can be and provides us with the resources to do so.

There’s definitely some horror stories of publishers derailing the vision of a game or forcing arbitrary restrictions on the dev team. So I’m super glad to be able to say our experience with Freedom has been far from any of that. Freedom has been a true partner to us, only enhancing and supporting our vision. We were very careful when considering whether to go with a publisher or not. In the end, we selected Freedom because they are committed to our vision of the game, and I trust they want to see it reach its full potential as we see it. So just to close, we’ll continue to maintain our dedication to the craft and have complete creative/development autonomy.

As always, thank YOU for making this milestone possible. And hoping for the best on this new lap around the sun, talk to you soon!

- Jia

Hi!

It's been about a month, so I thought I'd do a quick update on some gameplay things I've been working on. Also cannot believe it's already December...

Cursed Cycle

In Act II (not in demo), the main NPCs live on their own schedules. This leads to a few interesting narratives. Here's a quick snippet from one of those cutscenes I recently finished up...





Other updated things in the full game version:

- finalizing and polishing True Ending
- cut scenes for Good Ending
- quality of life fixes like more pianos for fast-travel
- general bug fixes

Anyways, happy holidays and talk to you soon~

Sincerely,
Jia