This is a possible layout for the redesign on the skills UI, pending sizing for the extra catalyst slots.
Chickenwhite is back to work on art and even got us the first Electrosprite TF image. Hopefully she has all of the new art done in early July and chapter 5 can be done. Because boy howdy have we been waiting to make us some chapter 2.
Changelog below, but first an important note: This is the NC+ for chapter 1 patch, allowing you to replay the chapter after completing it. You must complete it using this version, that is, if you have a save that has already completed the chapter, that save will be missing a lot of stuff when it boots NC+. This is because the variables needed to reconstruct the chapter weren’t saved.
Also, there are several spots where the game checks if you have a form available to determine if you can see a cutscene. For example, if your NC+ has alraune form in it, you won’t be able to see Adina. This will be fixed later, because I need to restructure several scenes and I don’t want to introduce new bugs at this stage.
The Changelog
Version 3.20
Major *You can now modify autosaves, shader options, and asset streaming options from the main menu. *Added New Chapter Plus for chapter 1!
Minor *Added dedicated pause menu for Nowhere. *Rebel golems no longer have antennae *Added missing bestiary entries *Darkmatters in southern Regulus are no longer hostile when Christine is a darkmatter. *Options for games not currently present should no longer appear. *Small enemies now only need 5 KOs to show all their stats in the combat inspector. *Zombee quest should be resolved even if you defeat the cultist without Mei getting zombee’d. *Added back in pre-combat dialogues when Mei meets her first monstergirl. *Added holding Ctrl to move 10 entries at a time to the shop menus. *Put a few invis-zones and moved a few enemy patrols so you don’t get into a fight immediately upon entering a room in some places. *Unified statistic icons in the UI a bit. *Added Gravemarker dialogue for the Dimensional Trap Dungeon. *Florentina now says Pepper Pie can be used three times a battle instead of just once. *Added Shields/Adrenaline to the combat glossary. *Added a gems page to the combat glossary. *Added an autosave indicator. *Activating switches in the Trap Dungeon Door Maze won’t stop field abilities. *Bestiary now shows the enemy’s level (which is used for JP calculations). *Zombee battle TF now correctly shows 6 CP cost instead of 2. *You can now refuse Meryl’s help in the manor basement. She will remain nearby if you change your mind. *Added Share;Lock handler for slime Mei.
Combat Balance *Paragons now have +100 Acc/Evd/Ini instead of a multiplier. *Can no longer use Mei’s Hive Scout Call For Help after a free action.
Bugs *Fixed Aquillia not having a profile portrait when still named “Prisoner” *Removed some debug text *Fixed some missing map tiles *Fixed the underwater shader not activating correctly. *Fixed Latex Christine’s profile vanishing. *Can no longer mug the enemies during the memory doll sequence. *Mugging werecats should no longer advance the Cassandra timer. *Should no longer sometimes trigger a battle in the Quantir Yard SW from the western door. *Fixed a bug with the zombee quest state. *Can no longer transform at the gala, as amusing as that is. *Hopefully fixed chests clipping into the wall when opened. *Tellurium Mines quest entry should appear even if you skipped the work order. *Cleaned up some text mistakes. *Fixed JX-101’s profile not being updated when the quest is completed. *Mugging guards during the rubber fishing village segment should no longer behave oddly. *Fixed quest log not updating if you fail the rubber sequence due to Polaris. *Nix Nedar’s location entry should appear correctly now. *Fixed re-deploying the rope in Quantir. *Fixed the gem scrollbar and inventory scrolling not working on the gem merge interface. *Fixed music not resetting when retreating in an area with no level music. *Fixed a bug with Poison Darts showing the wrong damage. *Fixed an error in Petraian Flutter’s description. *Can no longer trigger the Nadia-tells-you-about-the-dungeon scene while reliving scenes. *Fixed inter-chapter catalyst problems.
Engine Upgrades *Journal now tracks paragon KOs and even shows a symbol when you’ve defeated a given paragon at least once. *Audio playback should now correctly track changing the audio device on OSX/Windows.
As is always the case, there’s a couple bugs I need to fix up that just got found, so I’ll be doing the release when they’re done. After that, the next goal is NC+ for chapter 5.
Bad Things on the Art Front
Chicken’s tablet is now broken due to Windows updates messing the drivers up. So she’s finally getting a new one, and going through all of that nonsense. Really, our studio seems to be having a bad June, what with all the injuries, sickness, and equipment failures.
And we’re very close to finishing up the chapter 5 art, too.
I am working my way through the (many) bugs in v3.19 and don’t have an update yet this week.
Hopefully there will be one next week, with NC+ for chapter 1 available.
Chicken has recovered enough to get BACK TO WORK so we’re only a little bit more behind than we were already! Yay!
Meanwhile, Slitted Eye development continues. Due to Chicken’s injury, we weren’t able to do our pre-render prototyping last week, so it’ll be taking place this week.
A photo of a dog?
A very strange breed of dog. Extremely agile, doesn’t pant very much, and has retractable claws. Still good, though.
You can find a changelog below, but the big ones are: Auto-win handler: Mugging enemies 5 levels below your level causes you to win instantly, no battle required Autosaves. The game now autosaves between rooms so you won’t lose progress if something melts! Gem Auto-transfer. When changing equipment, gems automatically move to the new gear. Lots of bugfixes.
Up next is New Chapter +, and that’s it for the (major) mechanical improvements. I’ll still be fixing bugs, and I still haven’t gotten everything I need for the UI update, so I’ll be working on Slitted Eye and Chapter 2 until I do.
Changelog
Major *Added auto-win handler. Mugging an enemy (or group) that you outnumber and are 5 levels higher than causes you to instantly win the battle. *Holding down Z and X to accelerate dialogue now also accelerates cutscenes, causing characters to move faster.
Minor *Fixed an error in the chapter 1 profiles. *Fixed various small chapter 1 errors (thanks, Yoshielder). *Enemies now emulate patrolling so they don’t always spawn in the same spot. *Fixed Mei and Christine being able to transform without enough CP. *You can now press the Run key to toggle paragon portraits in the journal. *Added chapter 5’s paragon portrait files. They’re not in the game yet. *Pressing left and right on the New Save button when saving now scrolls pages.
Combat Balance *All HoTs will run after DoTs, meaning the healing applies after the damage, regardless of the order the effects were applied. *Changing jobs in mid-battle will set and unset passive effects correctly.
Engine Upgrades *Added autosave handler. Instructions on how to use it are in the Saves/Autosave/ folder. *You can now use PgUp/PgDn/Home/End to navigate the save file listing at a campfire. *You can now push F4 to immediately jump back to the title screen during gameplay. *Gems now auto-transfer when changing equipment, if the new equipment has enough slots. *Combat Inspector now has a scrollbar for effects. *Audio volumes now save to the config file whenever the player hits Okay on the options menu, instead of just when loading a game.
That’s right, the big announcement is our next studio project, Slitted Eye. Coming to PC in October (probably).
You play as a cat, Wispers, as terrible things crawl in the dark house around you. Make sure none of them get to your sleeping, unaware human.
We were heavily inspired by Five Nights at Freddy’s and wanted to do our own take on the weird subgenre, so here we are. Plus Chickenwhite is a huge FNAF fan.
The game is a 3D pre-rendered survival horror where you must use Wispers’ limited stamina and simple cat abilities to ward off a collection of night horrors. Unlike FNAF, you can move between rooms during the later nights. The enemies can attack your human, Charlotte, directly, or they can make a lot of noise and wake her up. And if she wakes up, she’ll put Wispers outside, were he can’t protect her. By the time he comes back in, it’s too late…
During the day, you can explore the house and interact with the radio, answering machine, TV, and newspapers to get important backstory. Where did these creatures come from, what do they want with Charlotte, and how does this dumb cat stop them?
And yes, because this is us, there’s some bad-end TF stuff. It’s off-camera, because this is a mainstream game, but it’s there.
Patrons will, of course, receive a free copy of the game. We haven’t decided on a price point yet, but it’ll likely be 5-10 USD at launch.
We want to have it out for October because there’s something spooky about that month. We’re hoping to attract some streamer and let’s play attention to boost the game.
Koops is the art lead for this game, with Urimas and Stinkehund doing the 3D render work. Salty is doing the engine. For technical reasons, Chickenwhite is doing the final shot assembly instead of Koops.
What about Chapter 2?
Chapter 2 will continue development while Slitted Eye is being worked on. Because of the pre-rendering, the game doesn’t require an extremely complicated engine, and the concept work is actually almost complete as of June 1st (Koops has one concept left to finish).
We hope to have chapter 2’s first release out before the end of the year. The Mechanical Patch is almost complete, and I (Salty) am going to be starting on maps for chapter 2 very soon.
Why this, why now?
The team has been wanting to make a 3D game for a while now, both to teach ourselves the production cycle and to acclimate the artists to the tools. We’re using Blender for this with touch-ups in ClipStudio. Urimas has been experimenting with Blender for a while now (see the loading screen for String Tyrant) and has become rather adept. So we’re making a game and he’s teaching the other artists what he knows.
Also we want to make a game where you play a cat because cats are fluffy babies.
Oh and maybe it will take off and we’ll make money off it that we can use to fund Pandemonium idk seems unlikely.
Mechanical Patch
The next version is still being worked on. It contains enemy patrol scattering, adds the ability to show paragons in the bestiary, fixed the HoT/DoT priority issue, adds an autosave handler, causes gems to transfer when changing equipment, adds the ability to accelerate cutscenes with Z/X, and allows auto-win on mugging an enemy weaker than your party.
I am going to be working on New Chapter + this week. Depending on the sheer number of bugs that will cause, it will be out next week or the week after.
This version finishes the journal up, fixes some bugs, and adds the asset streaming code. Let me know if you encounter serious bugs. The game’s memory usage should be half what it was before and it should load considerably faster. Hooray!
Artistry
Chicken has, as of v3.18, officially updated most of the art. All of the primary enemies and bosses in chapter 5 are updated. A few enemies (done by Koops) have “Good enough” shading and will get updated later.
She is now working on the Darkmatter and Electrosprite TF images. After that, a couple frames for 55 to delineate her new jobs, and we’ll be moving on to chapter 2.
Big Announcement Next Week
I was going to say “First week of June” but the Monday lands on May 31st so I’ll just do it then. Get psyched!
I know I said there’d be a release this week, but there will be one next week because a bunch of bugs showed up and I want them fixed first.
This version will contain the new asset streaming capability for the engine, allowing it to load images on-the-fly rather than loading everything at once. This both reduces system memory usage and overall load times.
And yes, it can be turned off in the options menu if it’s causing some sort of system problem.
Depending on the machine, load times were reduced by up to 50% in our early trials, and memory usage is cut by about 45%. These are major gains!
I just need to fix a few errors like the images loading with the wrong filters, and it’ll be ready. And since Chicken is still doing more reshadings, some of chapter 5’s shading will be updated, too!
Big Announcement Coming in June
Nothing about it now, but the studio has a big announcement coming at the start of June. So get real excited, you jerks.
Chicken wanted to modernize the remaining TF art in chapter 1 so everything looks all nice. Well now she’s done doing that, so chapter 1’s next release will have all of its art! Good job, Chicken.
Now do chapter 5, Chicken.
Release Next Week
I wanted to have the next journal update published today, but I have like 4 quests left in chapter 5 so it’ll be out next week, along with all the lovely art.
After the journal is ready to go, I’m going to be doing some backend upgrades to lower loading speeds by delaying loading of assets until they are closer to actually being needed. This should also reduce memory footprint, so everyone wins!
I’ve completed most of the journal entries for chapter 5. Currently mopping up the location blurbs and then doing the quests, and then it’s back to engine upgrades. So no release this week, but likely next week.
Artsy Partsy
Chicken has finished a couple upgrades to chapter 1, this time, it’s Mei’s Bee TF updated with the new shading. She’s going to be updating the alraune TFs next, and then that’s it for chapter 1 holy cow.
Meanwhile, Koops finished the new intro image and is doing a concept for a character in chapter 2. Patrons will get to see her next week.
Hund and Urimas are spinning in place (or alternately, working on experimental stuff not related to the project).
Pandemonium Development 