I have finished Florentina’s abilities and am presently upgrading the combat interface and fixing the (large amount) of (obvious) bugs. I want to get Field Abilities implemented this week before I have to work on Pairanormal for a few days.
The Big Balance Patch is already looking pretty darn good!
Artistry
Chicken has produced a concept of one of the new enemies and is presently working on an animation for her own sick purposes. Take a look!
Koops has delivered a concept for a new character in chapter 1 – Miho the Kitsune Bounty Hunter! Patrons get to see her this week!
Urimas has fixed his computer and is making sprites because he’s a spriter and that’s what they do.
Hund has made some… modifications to Florentina’s wardrobe.
Florentina has two new classes, Mediator and Treasure Hunter. Rather than take Chicken away from her work designing enemies and updating the shading, I got Hund to add a hat so you can tell them apart.
Here we can see the area transitions that will be present in the Big Balance Patch for chapter 1. These show up when you first enter a new area and are present in the top right during normal gameplay to give you a better idea of where you currently are, meaning you don’t need to keep rechecking the map.
What’s This? A Chapter 2 Story?
That’s right, as part of the Save Sinpai Stream, I got a 10$ commission from Aaaac, world-famous author of Monsters of the Forest. It’s a story featuring Sanya and Izuna from chapter 2!
WHAAAAT? EVEN MORE BONUS STUFF? SEALED STONE MAIDEN GETS AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION?
Holy cow is there a lot of bonus stuff this week!
Sealed Stone Maiden, a Japanese game by Petrificator, has gotten a 1.16 release (Twitter thread here). Why am I posting about it here?
Because I translated it! That’s right, the game is now available in English. You can download it here.
I will be putting up a TFGS entry later on (the author is currently working on bugfixes, so I’m giving him some time for that), but you can play it start to finish right now. I can’t translate the addons and some of the text is messed up as a result, but the game is very playable.
The game contains petrification, freezing, goldenization, metalization, getting turned into a doll, getting covered in rubber, and really cute girls I mean come on. Look at Celine.
Coding
I hope to be done Pairanormal’s first pass by as early as tomorrow, possibly Wednesday, at which point it’s back to Pandemonium coding for me.
Arting
Chicken has delivered one of the new enemy concepts for chapter 1 and is going to be getting me some of the new NPCs. Koops has delivered some chapter 2 concepts and will be working on one of the new chapter 1 NPC concepts as well.
Urimas’ computer blew up and is in the shop for fixin’, so he’s out until at least Thursday. Stinkehund is working on chapter 5’s area transitions.
Curious Cat
Note: Koops also specified the Loch Ness Monster is a favourite, and Chicken really likes Slenderman. Make of that what you will.
I’ve been working on Pairanormal this week. The game has 5 chapters, and I’m about halfway through chapter 4. Hopefully I’ll have the whole thing complete and ready for testing by the end of this week so I can get back to Pandemonium.
Art
As you can see above, the shading updates are rolling right along. Urimas has been out of commission with an earache for the past while, though.
As I mentioned months ago, my obligations to Pairanormal have come due. I will be spending some time each week working on that, alternating between it and Pandemonium. I hope to have Pairanormal done and released in July.
Artistic Stuff
Patrons will be getting to see some of the new stuff from chapter 1! Pyxxis has mostly completed a new map all by himself oh he’s so special. Otherwise it’s all keeping on.
It’s Star-Guardian 55! During the Sinpai Fundraiser stream, I (Salty) acquired a sketch from Cocomint for a 10$ donation of 55 wearing the Star-Guardian outfits from League of Legends. Cuz Sinpai likes those.
And then she went and colored it because Coco is crazy. Enjoy!
Abyss Cave Gets English Release
Hey remember those game reviews I wrote a while back? Abyss Cave got an official English translation. I asked Toka and he said it was okay to help spread it around, so here’s the TFGDB link for it if you want to play it!
I have completed all of Mei’s “Normal” class abilities. All that is left is her Zombee special class abilities, then I will be moving on to Florentina’s.
After that, it’s “Field Skills”, abilities you can use in the field to dodge enemies, trap them, stun them, open locks, etc. These are mostly used in chapter 2 for puzzle solving but I may as well put a few in chapter 1 to make sure the player knows how the system works.
Artistic Stuff
Chickenwhite has delivered a new enemy concept for chapter 1, which patrons get to see next week. Stinkehund has finished most of chapter 1’s area title images. Urimas is getting me some new tiles for the new areas in chapter 1 and has finished most of the ability icons.
Mario promises he’s working very hard on the alraune story. We all believe him. Pyxxis has completed some map prototypes of one of the new areas in chapter 1.
I’m working my way through the abilities in combat, and there are a bunch. Abilities like poisoning enemies, stacking debuffs, increasing damage via tags, converting enemies to your side, and more. I hope to have most of Mei’s abilities done sometime this week.
The Art
Thanks to the donations of many kind individuals, we raised around 750$ for the Save Sinpai Stream. Some of that was art time, including a landscape by Stinkehund, some sketches by Koops and Chickenwhite, and even a 3D model by Urimas.
Which is to say, art resumes this week. Moving right along.
String Tyrant moves 600 copies for Black Lives Matter
In case you were not aware, the itch.io bundle for BLM was the last week. String Tyrant was in that bundle, along with 1700+ games from itch.io. The game was downloaded just over 600 times during the bundle period, so clearly we made some kind of impact. Good job, everyone.
In other news, the String Tyrant HD Art Pack is being released to anyone who has purchased the game. If you bought it on itch.io, check the downloads section. On Steam, it will be a zip file in the game’s files. If you got it via patreon, a link will be going up soon.
An Alarming Amount of Curiosity
These questions just appear I don’t know who’s sending them.
Chicken has finished that emergency concept art I needed done and patrons get to see it today! Urimas is spriting, Hund is doing overlays, and Koops is petting her cats.
In coding news, I’ve finished combat’s mechanical overhaul. Now all I need to do is create all the missing abilities, overhaul all the enemy statistics files, modify all the equipment, fix the remaining GUI errors, balance test, bug test…
Save Sinpai Stream!
I am currently organizing a stream to help friend-artist and rubber enthusiast Goop-Sinpai to pay some bills. It’s a fun and dumb charity stream.
What we’re doing: Sinpai is going to play Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door until she either beats the game or falls asleep. Everyone else gets to tune in and mock her.
When it’s happening: Friday, June 12th, 4pm Central (UTC -6) until Sinpai beats the game or cannot continue.
What you can get: We currently have some slots for sketch commissions, story commissions, and even a 3D voxel animation slot! See above for the list!
You’ll be able to begin pledges as of Thursday June 11th. Payment details to come.
If you’ve got a couple bucks and want to help out a member of the community, swing by Sinpai’s server this Friday!
We’re still keeping on. I’ve almost got the combat inspector ready to go, and hope to have the victory screen handled this week. I have to work at my day job again so development will slow a bit.
Urimas is getting sprites, Hund is getting overlays, Chicken is doing art. You know, the usual.
Now is therefore probably a good time to discuss the launch of the game and how well it did on itch.io. This post is mostly for other indie developers who are thinking about their first launch or want some insight. If you’re not an indie developer then by reading past this point you are pretending to be one. Be sure to put on your Crime Hat.
Here you can see the analytics page for the so-far lifetime of the game, which was released March 21st. The number of views is pageviews, downloads is all downloads (including the demo), payments is purchases in total (note that paying more is an option on itch.io, so a payment is at least 5$ but can be more).
As you might expect, high interest at first and then a tapering off as all the people who were predisposed to play the game got it and played it. Since then, we’re in a steady state of people finding the game and checking it out, but we have not done any new advertisements.
This is the last 30 days information of where the origin of a pageview was. I can’t get information before the 30 day mark, but I can tell you that the majority of the traffic during that time was from the blog/patreon/tfgs. Itch.io’s internal search has taken over as the primary discovery method.
So why these various places? We did advertisements on hypnohub, which can you see in this pool. For deviantart, all of the artists posted an update, particularly Goop-Sinpai who did some art for the game. That drove a lot of traffic. Artist inkyfluff (who if you don’t follow on twitter, you should) drove a lot of the twitter clicks. As for youtube, we got letsplayed by RiskRim who does a lot of horror game LPs.
The moral of the story: Advertising works. Get everyone to advertise and the clicks come in. Disclosure: We did not give a free copy to RiskRim, that came out of the blue. We’re still happy he played the game!
We did send keys out to various LPers, mostly horror LPers. None of them did an LP though two did get back to us. One was busy as they are a healthcare worker and there’s something of a pandemic on, and the other has a backlog but is interested. More on this as it develops, but blindfiring to people who don’t know you has a low success rate. Still, you have to get the word out and it’s not like it costs you anything, keys are free.
Interface Commentary
I will be doing a post about Steam’s interface later. It’s worse.
Itch.io’s interface is quite easy to use. Almost everything about the game’s page is on a single interface. This includes screenshots, description, pricing, tags, and uploads.
The game is uploaded as a zip file, that’s it. You just upload the file, mark it as paid/demo and which OS it’s for, and you’re off to the races.
The only complaint I have is that the uploads section gets a little hairy to manage when you have a lot of game versions. All of the String Tyrant patches are on itch.io but most of them are hidden, so I have to bubble them to the top of the list when I add a new one. This is my complaint. It sure is minor isn’t it?
This is called foreshadowing.
All in all, itch.io is a great platform that’s easy to use and I encourage every indie developer to put their games on it. If you have the technical ability to make a game, you have the technical ability to put it on itch.io.
This week I completed MP, CP, Shields, Adrenaline, new abilities, reorganization, and lots and lots of other stuff. It’s mostly me just chewing through yet more backend. This week, side-switching, change-forms-in-combat, victory handling, and more!
Artistic Action
Hund has completed several more overlays for chapter 1. Chicken had a busy week but is going to be getting me some concepts for chapter 2 before going back to updating the old art. Koops is going to be back to work soon. Urimas helped me with icons because he’s a spriter and deserves what he gets.
Amazingly, MarioneTTe is now back to writing stories! Because he got laid off. But he’s writing stories again! Alraune story is now in production!
Next Week
String Tyrant itch.io retrospective just before the Steam release. I talk about platforms, budget, promotion, cost, all that crap. Good if you’re an aspiring indie developer or just a nerd who likes boring stuff.
I have done a lot of Big Balance Patch stuff, from getting Effects to work to handling all the extra scripting stuff needed. But more importantly, the Steam version of String Tyrant has been sent in for its second review. I’ll make a post as soon as we have a firm release date because we had to edit the trailer a bit and then re-submit for review.
The Steam version of String Tyrant supports achievements and I managed to wrangle in the Steam backend despite the automated functions crashing when used and the manual functions having errors in the provided sample code. The life of a developer.
Artistic Stuff
Still trucking. Apparently a big Terrarria update dropped so Chicken has been useless, but art is getting done. Koops may apparently be back to art soon as well.
Pandemonium Development 