Hi everyone!
Winter is almost over! But the seasonal devblog is finally here ❄️
We hope you all enjoyed the start of 2025. It’s a big year for MIO!
The game is still set for release this year—no official date yet (👀)! We’ve been working on this project for the last four years. While it’s starting to feel long, we’re still quite hyped by the game so I’d say that’s a good sign!
Last stretch
We’re now entering the last months of development and there’s still so many things left undone. Little polish, postprocess we wished we could have implemented and hope we will still have time to do it at the last minute.
A lot of small things; this animation that stutters a bit; a room that is already cool but with a bit of time and care from our art director, could be even better; a cinematic which is fine as it is, but adding some flying particles and a little bit of camera polish would do wonders.
This boss that still lacks a bit of balance. This killzone is a little bit too big. This challenge could be a little bit nicer. Or harder. It depends which one we’re talking about.
AND IT’S EVERYWHERE 😬
Never make your own game engine. There was a bug with the hot reload of MIO’s animation. The result in game while playing was incredible 💫
Fortunately, our publisher, Focus Entertainment, is lending us a wonderful QA team. More than 10 people are playing the game everyday, over and over - Many thanks to them for giving us feedback and bug reports, they are wonderful <3. It looks like an everlasting task to fix everything but hopefully, we'll ship MIO with as few bugs and problems as possible ; a version of the game we’ll be proud to bring to you!
Playtests
With this goal in mind, we have been working on a special playtest in the last weeks, specially designed for the bosses.
It was very interesting. The players unfortunately could not experience much of the “exploration and backtracking” side of the game in this time frame, but we tried to put them as much as possible in real condition in front of most of the game bosses.
I say “most of” because even in four full days of playtests, there was not enough time for everyone to test every boss.
The results were generally quite positive and will allow us to work on the less satisfying encounters. Here is a quick insight of the results for the first boss of the game.
We learned a lot from this playtest. In this example, it led to several changes.
There is now a health fountain not far from the boss that the players can find if they look for it. We changed its intro animation and the look of his arena. He is now a little bit more difficult : some playtesters killed him a bit too fast for our taste.
We polished several of his animations in order to make him easy to understand, but still a little difficult to beat. It’s only the first boss after all, we don’t want him to be horribly hard to beat but he still needs to be a worthy challenge.
What about us?
The team on the game is getting progressively smaller while we quit the production process and we’re now only in post production. It’s so long to make a game! 😵
We also made a big lunch & secret santa at the end of December. The studio offered some MIO t-shirts to everyone. They’re very soft and comfy, it’s so fun to make goodies!
It was a calm period since most of us took some vacations and well deserved rest. After all, winter = snow = AWESOME ☃️
Ino definitely agrees with that !
Best winter for you all.
See you in spring! 🌟
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1672810/MIO_Memories_in_Orbit/