I have completed the first round of bug reports for String Tyrant and have started on the Quality-of-Life upgrades. These little changes make the game more pleasant to play, such as: Listing savegames when asked, a detailed help prompt, sound options, a “take all” command, and many more silly things people have asked for. The sound options were exceedingly silly.
And we celebrate with maximum smug. Thanks Rune for making us a new icon!
That’s right, it’s February (again) and that means it’s Pandemonium’s birthday! We have a new icon, a new header, and some bonus art courtesy of Sinpai and Klaysee!
It’sCherche, of Fire Emblem fame, having been transformed into a golem. Klaysee got the sketch, and I tricked convinced Sinpai to color and shade it.
In the last four years, we have:
Looking forward the next ten freaking years before chapter 6 is done!
I have completed the upgrade to String Tyrant’s engine. The entire thing is now built in Tiled, so I can start on the bugfixing work. Should be done this week, and then it’s time for new features!
Stinkehund has gotten us several layouts for the new title screen menus that look very nice. I have considered allowing him to live.
Chicken has finished some more updates, including Doll Christine having swappable hairstyles. Koops was occupied. Urimas is working on some dance sprites for chapter 2.
We don’t have a specific date for the game’s birthday so I just put it someplace in February. Well get excited for that because some stupid bonus stuff is getting made for it.
Local maniac Stinkehund has updated our merch stores (see bottom of post) with the designs from String Tyrant. Isn’t the dancer pretty?
If you decide you want one, our cut goes to fund the game, same as a patreon donation except you get a swell shirt out of the deal instead of warm fuzzy feelings. And due to our new gratitude-telemetry device*, you can now get both!
I’ve started work on porting the maps of String Tyrant from script to Tiled. I’d have completed it today but, y’know, day job.
Once the maps are ported, I’ll polish up the outstanding bugs and put out a prototype for everyone who has 5$ patron access (or has in the past).
Pandemonium has not received any serious/fatal bug reports from 5-5f so I don’t need to put out any quick patches. Patches will still happen periodically with bugfixes or art updates.
SX-399 got a modified portrait to reflect her sassy attitude. Hund has completed all of the combat damage animations and is going to be working on getting us the finalized title screen layout, since having a box in the middle of the screen looks like ass.
Urimas said he’d have Izuna’s sprite sheet done today. He has not.
Koops has been doing a wild pile of crazy art commissions. Check the patreon to see one!
Look at these fuggin’ q’s.
Get it here (Mediafire) (Mega.nz)
This prototype adds the Manufactory subquest, a new campfire menu (except the Skillbooks menu), a bunch of new maps for chapter 5, bug fixes, updated art, and Queen Bee Mei.
How do you access the Manufactory? It’s on the work terminal in the first half of Chapter 5. Just take the Efficiency job and take the tram to Sector 99.
We have some savefiles if you need them.
Right now, just use the campfire costumes menu while a bee in chapter 1, and you too can be this stylish insect royalty.
Now I’m going to go pass out.
I have some more dialogue and form cases to write, and there’s a few things I want to polish a bit. This will be the last content patch for a while so I want it to look all nice.
Chicken has finished Queen Bee Mei, updated Florentina’s shading, and updated Latex Christine’s shading. These will all be in the Manufactory patch, plus whatever else she gets done between now and then.
These questions just appear out of nowhere. Who’s sending them?
I have had a very bad week.
I expect the Manufactory patch will be out next week. I hope to have it sent to the testers on Thursday.
We have the Queen Bee Mei emotes all finished and they will be in the manufactory patch. You’ll be able to unlock the costume in chapter 1 with a password that you will get in the beehive (or you can just check the patreon because I’ll post it there as well).
From here on out, Chicken is remastering art. Hund will be finishing the remaining attack animations. Urimas is working on some secret stuff that Discord sort of already knows about. Just saying in case you were thinking of hanging out there.
Hey we got some String Tyrant questions this week! Can’t wait to finish work on it.
Here is the link to the gdoc I mentioned there. Recommendations welcome, and I encourage you to write reviews. We need more in-depth discussion of TF games.
I’ve been making maps this week. Manufactory has 2 more maps to go any then it’s ready for entity and cutscene work.
We’re at the boring phase of development where we don’t have exciting announcements or amazing art to show. Hopefully I have my testing prototype for the Manufactory out to testers next week.
Urimas made a bunch of animated factory tiles for the Manufactory. Chicken has gotten us some Queen Bee Mei emotes, hopefully those will be ready when the next patch ships. Hund is almost done the Terrify damage animation.
The hunger for knowledge is never fully sated.
I have produced the 2020 budget report for January. It has a bunch of boring numbers and nobody will look at it!
I got finished the upgrade to the transformation and costumes UI. We now have a (crude) comparison handler. This will look nicer once actual UI people get through with it, I’m just showing off that we do, in fact, have this coded in now. It compares your current form vs the form highlighted using little arrows to indicate stat changes.
I’ll be finishing the password UI today/tomorrow and then it’s off to work on The Manufactory.
So, we had a meeting and determined Chicken will need about 3 months to renormalize ALL of the assets from chapter 1 and 5. That’s good, because we need to finish String Tyrant and the Big Balance Patch.
I bumped Queen Bee Mei up to the top of the priority list and hope to have it out in time for the next chapter 5 patch. Otherwise, it’s a lot of art upgrades from here on out.
Stinkehund is almost finished the combat animations. Koops has started doing some chapter 2 concept work.
Head over to the Patreon to see some bonus stuff! January is going to have a whole bunch because some very nice and smart and special person commissioned Koops to draw some cool concepts!
Y’all be curious as hell.
Note: That’s a video. Search for “Rubberfruit Soap” on youtube to find it.
It doesn’t make any more sense in context, don’t worry.
The time has come for 2020. So hey let’s talk about the video game.
Amazingly I actually got done some coding stuff in the couple of days I had between MANY MANY shifts at my day job. So I spent it working on the campfire UI!
The UI now uses a grid system for easier access and expandability. You are now two keypresses away from the least common options and one or zero from the most common options. I can also more easily expand the grid left and right to use the widescreen space.
The other UIs will follow suit eventually. For now, only the campfire menus look like this.
The relive menu looks a lot sportier.
As does the chat menu.
Warping now shows the region map and map markers, making it easier to keep together mentally where everything is.
And the save menu now supports pages, shows way more saves, allows multiple types of sorting, and lets you delete saves you don’t need anymore.
This is as far as I got in the three days I spent on it. I’ll be finishing up the rest this week, and then starting on The Manufactory.
Koops hurt her hand and got sick. Chicken is a holiday. Stinkehund finished the light/holy attack animation. Urimas got us some wicked-sick UI stuff and also finished the diagonals of Queen Bee Mei. As expected, not a lot due to Holidays. We have a team meeting on the 4th to set out goals for the next decade.
Holy cow we had us a load of questions.
There’s not much of an update this week, everyone is busy with the holidays.
I died of exhaustion but some jerkoff paramedic revived me.
Remember String Tyrant? I got Goop-Sinpai to do an ad commission! This is a WIP of the animation (oh my god it has so many errors it’s a WIP) where Mary gets doll’d!
It will be finished and used to promote the game when it launches (probably in February) along with some other stuff we’ll make later.
Why are you seeing this? Well it’s the holidays, so this is our gift to you.
Higher-res less-crusty versions of the image.
I’ve also got some lettering done by Chickenwhite, but she saved it in a format I can’t open so I’ll update this post later once I get it.
As usual, here are the Curious Cat questions for the week.
Pandemonium Development 
