Hello, Friend!
How have you been? This has been a crazy few months for myself, so let's delve into all the great news so I can get back to work!
Beta Playthrough
One of Soul Saga's amazing backers, Roydical, played through the Soul Saga beta. You may remember some of his videos in the past covering some of the features in Soul Saga's beta. Here's a highlight reel from his experience of the latest version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVfMLVVl27M
Settled In
You may remember from the last update that I had to leave my apartment I had been staying in for 6 years and move to a new home. That move went very well and I'm all settled in. Here's a picture of the team hard at work in the new house!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzsZ4G-42aE
Progress!
I have made a LOT more progress on Soul Saga not revealed in the beta above. Mostly I've worked on cutscenes, which are almost completely done at this point. I also recently began overhauling the airship exploration mode of Soul Saga to make it a much more important part of the overall experience. My biggest hurdle I'm recently facing is that many assets for the airship scenes need to be optimized, sometimes even recreated. So I've recently picked up blender to optimize them, and even work with rigging and animating some NPCs.
Game Development, Destroyer of Time
I recently realized that we have just passed the 4 year anniversary of Soul Saga's Kickstarter. Absolutely insane. When I first launched the Kickstarter I had no idea I would become so meticulously obsessed with creating such a polished experience, and as the only full time developer. I know I had always put a TON of time into Soul Saga, but it wasn't until I started testing Soul Saga on Steam that I had something really logging (some of) the hours I spend developing Soul Saga. It was quite jarring to see the numbers add up (over 100 hours a week).
Open World Airship Exploration
The most prominent enhancement to Soul Saga is that the airship exploration will be a seamless open world exploration experience. You will be able to fly around all of Medonia, exploring every nook and cranny of this beautiful and diverse sky world with your airship.
One of the biggest hurdles of moving to a more open-world-like system is that I had to work on the aesthetics quite a bit. I started by identifying the most important aspect of living in a floating island in the sky: the clouds. From there I decided to focus on the clouds until I got them just right, and I really like where we ended up with them:
There's still some polishing I need to do with it before going into more details, so for now here's a video of my early scene loading prototype I made a few months ago (and have since completed). I've made much more exciting progress on airship exploration and am ecstatic to share more with you in the next update!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1abj6krXZA
Kickstarter's Underbelly
Recently I had been approached by some individuals with offers to trade your backer information. I, of course, promptly denied it in my trademarked "emotionally blunt" fashion. However I've always felt the need to be as transparent as possible with you, and I felt you needed to know this type of thing DOES exist, and not every project creator may share my views on privacy. Be careful with who you pledge to on Kickstarter, because inevitably they will have a lot of information about you and Kickstarter cannot control what they do with that information.
What Do You Think?
I couldn't have made Soul Saga without you, and I'd love to hear more of your feedback and thoughts. Please feel free to follow me on Twitter, like on Facebook, and join me with other Soul Saga fans in the Disastercake Discord chat channel! Talk to you soon, friend!