Momento News

[p]Hello![/p][p][/p][p]Hope you are doing well! I can’t believe that it is almost July! The year just flies by when you’re developing a game. I swear I did start writing this newsletter in May but there’s been a lot going on. 🤯 If you’ve been seeing us more on social media - we’ve hired a community manager to pick up on our slack![/p][p][/p][p]First things first: we’re in the Cozy and Family Friendly Festival on Steam at the moment as a Featured Upcoming Game! ✨ If you haven’t already checked it out, you should do so - there’s a lot of very cool games featured and some of our friends have demos up (if you like cute cats and delivering mail, check out Catto’s Post Office)![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We’re so grateful to our friends at RokaPlay for organising this event and allowing us to be part of it. Don’t forget to sign up to their Cozy and Family Friendly Newsletter to keep up to date with all things cozy games! 🌷[/p][p][/p][p]👀 Meanwhile, in game development:[/p][p][/p][p]😎 Julian is currently doing some work on user experience and feedback in the placement system allowing for more precision placement of items. He’s recently added in the VFX and UI for affinity selection, dynamic state changes, and a placement tool which allows for some really neat stuff (yes, we can finally stack the blocks in a pyramid! 😭🙏)[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Which will you choose: dino, teddy, or unicorn?[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Not just a flat pyramid either… a full on 3D pyramid. 📐 Yes, we use 2D assets.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Dynamic state changes! The object automatically changes based on where you are hovering so you can decorate those side walls with eaaaase.[/p][p][/p][p]✍️🎨 Jasmine and I have been trying to tie up content for the beta. We’ve had to do a giant overhaul of our furniture and item database to fast track our content creation pipeline, so Jasmine has had to create a lot of template items to unblock whiteboxing.[/p][p][/p][p]Speaking of whiteboxing, we did a big whitebox review where we played through the whole game to see if the story direction works in the way we want it to - which I’m glad to say that it does in general! There’s a lot of things that need fleshing out and some shifting around but we can see the vision. 📚[/p][p][/p][p]💾 Zac (our systems programming wizard!) has been working on optimization for the game ahead of the beta- we have so many assets in terms of furniture and items that we have to make sure we have a way to load them all in without slowing down the game.[/p][p][/p][p]🖥️ Ryan has joined the team full time to help with UI and biz dev work! He has been working on the Creative Mode UI, which we also plan to have available in the beta. He’s recently added a search bar so you search things by type, which we’re hoping to expand so we can search multiple tags. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]🎧 Our sound designers and composers are working on new sounds and music. Story mode has a bunch of new interactions and UI which need some chill sound effects to give feedback as you make choices and uncover the story.[/p][p][/p][p]💡 We have a shader artist contracted (the wonderful Crystal) to look into more dynamic lighting, but this won’t be available for a little while yet! In the meantime she has been cleaning up and optimising all the shaders in the game![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]I’ve been using the precision placement tools to make very cluttered bookcases.[/p][p]
❗ On to beta news! Thank you so much for your patience. Our beta is going to be available to play to closed groups in the next few months! We still have some setup to do for this, as we will start testing in small groups before making it fully open to the whole mailing list. We will also have a Discord for the game opening up at the same time - so you can keep up to date with all the changes we will be making to the demo as you play it. ❗[/p][p][/p][p]We are so, so very close to having something for you all to play. 🙏 Keep an ear out! 🥰[/p][p][/p][p]Hope your weekends have been amazing![/p][p]Jess and the Momento team[/p]

Hello Hello!

We’ve been working on the new rooms that we chatted about in the last post, getting them laid out and getting all the new affinity objects in! 🤩 They look super pretty, Jasmine has done a really nice job with the art for the objects:

(I really just love playing around in creative mode every day to test stuff out)

We’ve also been working on creating different room sizes in the engine as we have been whiteboxing out all the levels so we now have the creative freedom to have small rooms, long rooms, tall rooms, large rooms, and deep rooms! 🤯 In addition, we also have room component blocks so we can make some cool overhangs and dividing walls.

(All of these are in engine! Apart from my rough drawovers haha)

We have our activity meter and task system set up as well! The more you decorate and explore the room, the more the activity meter will go up - you may even find some hidden puzzles and achievements which will give you bonus points. There are two extra special objects you can unlock on the activity meter.

(New UI in game!)

Zac has implemented our story tree so we can hook up rooms based on the outcome of previous rooms, so we’ll be able to play through our story and ensure that all the decisions are working and that the branches are making sense.

(The start of our story editor tree)

We also have a tech artist looking over our shaders at the moment and working out all those issues that we couldn’t quite solve (I do not have a math brain). So as well as being super readable, we have our occlusion masks working again and can hide things in bowls all whilst using a shader! 🥣

(If it fits, I sits)

What’s happening next??

Well, we’re going to continue polishing these new rooms for our demo. Jasmine is back from her holidays in Japan (Julian and I were very jealous) and is making the finalized furniture art for the remaining demo rooms! I’m helping out with a few of the more tedious tasks and then I’ll be jumping back into a second pass of whiteboxing (adding temp items to the new rooms).

Julian, on the other hand, will be some super secret squirrel stuff that we’ll be very excited to show you soon!

(It would be super cool to add little challenges to creative mode like ‘decorate a tiny space’ - what kind of challenges would you like?)

Hope you have a great week ahead of you! 🥰
Jess and the Momento Team

Hope your holiday period was joyous and relatively stress free! 🥳 We also briefly holidayed and have been back in action since early January - we haven’t disappeared off the face of the Earth, we promise! 🌏 After doing an internal playtest, we’ve been prototyping some new game systems that have changed a few things about gameplay for the better. We’re hoping to get a play tester demo into your hands ASAP - we haven’t forgotten! 🙏

A lot of cool stuff has been happening in the past two months, some of which we can’t talk about just yet, but what has been happening on the game that we can talk about? WELL:

🖥️ In programming/design, we all came up with some new gameplay systems as we felt there were some things lacking in our previous build. We now have a cool new feature called an affinity system, which are choices between objects that you choose in the room which spawn more objects based off of that. These affinity choices also affect the path you traverse in the game - so choose wisely. 🤔

Here’s a concept gif of the affinity choice that Jasmine has mocked up.

Also in programming and design, Julian has been improving the placement system to allow for greater precision in placement (using some linear algebra and vector mathematics) and already things are placing way nicer than they used to be! Zac is repurposing our story-mode editor to handle our new systems and allow me to create our story rooms by playing the game! 🙌🤯

Julian’s crazy gizmos for calculating placements (don't worry they are only for dev debugging and won't be in the final game).

🎨 On the art side… Jasmine is concepting up the new affinity item selections (as they will contain both the key choice and minor items that will swap out based on your choice). Our affinities are 🧪 Academic/Science, 🖌️ Creative/Art, and ⚽ Sport/Adventure (all with their own little quirks and additions) so we are trying to make items that match these! She’s also started conceptualizing the final versions of all our rooms based on our whiteboxed layouts - so yes, the childhood bedroom you’ve seen so much of is likely to have some changes! 👀

Version A, B, C of one of our new childhood bedrooms

📖 Which brings us to the story side of things! We did a massive rescope of the story tree at the end of January, trimming a lot of things that weren’t necessary ✂️ and picking the strongest story paths to move forward with 💪 (thankfully, we’d written a lot of different ones previously so we really like where we ended up!). These story trees are a little boring to look at (plus, don’t want to spoil anything!), so I’ll just share some of the vibes of some of the rooms instead. ✨

References we’ve pulled off google to inform how to further conceptualise our chosen rooms.

Thank you so much for your continued patience and support! ♥️ Game development is an absolute web of several things going on at once. We have a lot of major beats coming up and we hope to keep you up-to-date with everything that’s going on! Everything is cranking up a notch this year and we’re very excited to share a slice of Momento with you soon.

Hope you have a great week ahead of you! 🥰
Jess and the Momento Team

Happy Holidays!! Hope you are doing well! Thank you everyone who signed up to our playtesting form 🥰 we had a lot of interest so we will be going through them to start picking people for our first round of playtesting in January ♥️ Be sure to sign up to our newsletter to be notified about future playtesting rounds!

We’ve been doing a lot this past month and a bit! We had a push to get a playable version of the story mode for a local showcase night earlier in the month and we’ve been rebuilding rooms to allow for different sized rooms (getting tiling wall/floor assets etc.) Zac has also made us a hue-shift tool somewhat working so we and you will be able to change the colours of some of our items! Some of these include shelves, ottomans, beds, and paint tubes! Jasmine has been making the appropriate colour palettes for them 🤩🎨

(I did not intend for this to loop so beautifully… but it did)

Jasmine has also been testing out furniture that you could pop together and change around: kind of like modular IKEA prefabs.

Jasmine has also been doing some basic concepts of our level select, we expect this will change and evolve next year.

Julian has worked out some interval puzzle stuff as well as changing room sizes so we can have BIGGER and smaller and narrower and wider rooms. He’s currently working on system for some letters you can collect throughout the game.



I’ve been building the story branches in the engine, here’s a little sneak peak!

(Some of the art is still grey as they are temporary objects 😅)



There's still a lot we’re going to add to this prototype before we show the early playtesters! We’ll be going through a lot of the rooms we already have and looking for what we are missing. I wish I could also show you what our sound design team have been doing because it sounds BEAUTIFUL but alas, you’ll have to wait!

It’s amazing to look back and see how much we have achieved in this year! We built creative mode to build story mode, as well as the story mode builder. We did a lot of development on the narrative design for Momento, as well as all the art tests and standardization. We have a huge database for furniture and items, as well as our hue-shift tool to change their colours! We also went to a few showcases both local and international! 🤯 I know it’s been a quieter year for us on socials but we’ve been making a lot of good work! There are a couple more tests we need to do by the end of the year but soon we’ll just be building the story, making tons of art, and getting it out to our playtesters!

Thank you so much for following our journey so far! We wish you a very happy holiday season and new year! You’ll be hearing from us in January 🎆

Lots of love
Jess and the Momento Team

How are you? It feels like it has been (checks calendar) forever! Julian and I have been away doing showcases and talks and pitches and conferences but we’re back now and everyone is (mostly) healthy. We’ve reached 100,000 wishlists on Momento! We can’t believe we’d ever get to such a number when we first started this game! Thank you to everyone who has wishlisted and everyone who has joined us on our mailing list since then 🥰 we couldn’t be doing this without you!



Now back to the fun stuff: whilst Julian and I flew around the country with our 18 month old (conferencing with a toddler: not recommended), Jasmine and our programmer have been doing some super cool stuff in the engine like…drum roll🥁



OBJECT STATES: you can now rotate books to be different perspectives and open them 💕 (these are temp objects which is why they are currently greyscale). I am FROTHING🤤.

We’re planning to add this ability to some of our furniture as well - you can already open cupboards and drawers but you’ll also be able to turn chairs around to place them under desks and so on. 🛋️

We’re doing a HUGE content push for story mode at the moment. 💪 Which means Jasmine and I are doing a lot of temp art to import into the game whilst Julian and Zac work on the systems required such as the choice system, character relationship manager, clutter system, task system, and journal system to name a few. Now that we have our creative mode and a lot of awesome tools that our programming team has made, it is so much easier for us to add new objects and make more rooms super fast! 🏃

We've been testing out different room sizes - here's some sketches Jasmine has done on our massive Miro board for story mode.

In our latest newsletter, we asked you to tell us what kind of pets you would like to see in Momento (pictures were highly recommended!). We read through all of your replies and now have an overload of cute pet inspiration. Thank you all for sharing part of your lives with us 💕 If you haven't already, be sure to sign up to our newsletter if you'd like to have a say and help us with Momento's development!

That’s all for now - we have a few deadlines to meet before the end of the year so it’s back to the grindstone for us!

Hope you have a wonderful week ahead of you 🥰

Jess and the Momento Team