Hello!
Hope you are doing well! I canāt believe that it is almost July! The year just flies by when youāre developing a game. I swear I did start writing this newsletter in May but thereās been a lot going on. š¤Æ If youāve been seeing us more on social media - weāve hired a community manager to pick up on our slack!
First things first: weāre in the Cozy and Family Friendly Festival on Steam at the moment as a Featured Upcoming Game! āØ If you havenāt already checked it out, you should do so - thereās a lot of very cool games featured and some of our friends have demos up (if you like cute cats and delivering mail, check out Cattoās Post Office)!
Weāre so grateful to our friends at RokaPlay for organising this event and allowing us to be part of it. Donāt forget to sign up to their Cozy and Family Friendly Newsletter to keep up to date with all things cozy games! š·
š Meanwhile, in game development:
š Julian is currently doing some work on user experience and feedback in the placement system allowing for more precision placement of items. Heās recently added in the VFX and UI for affinity selection, dynamic state changes, and a placement tool which allows for some really neat stuff (yes, we can finally stack the blocks in a pyramid! šš)
Which will you choose: dino, teddy, or unicorn?
Not just a flat pyramid eitherā¦ a full on 3D pyramid. š Yes, we use 2D assets.
Dynamic state changes! The object automatically changes based on where you are hovering so you can decorate those side walls with eaaaase.
āļøšØ Jasmine and I have been trying to tie up content for the beta. Weāve had to do a giant overhaul of our furniture and item database to fast track our content creation pipeline, so Jasmine has had to create a lot of template items to unblock whiteboxing.
Speaking of whiteboxing, we did a big whitebox review where we played through the whole game to see if the story direction works in the way we want it to - which Iām glad to say that it does in general! Thereās a lot of things that need fleshing out and some shifting around but we can see the vision. š
š¾ Zac (our systems programming wizard!) has been working on optimization for the game ahead of the beta- we have so many assets in terms of furniture and items that we have to make sure we have a way to load them all in without slowing down the game.
š„ļø Ryan has joined the team full time to help with UI and biz dev work! He has been working on the Creative Mode UI, which we also plan to have available in the beta. Heās recently added a search bar so you search things by type, which weāre hoping to expand so we can search multiple tags.Ā
š§ Our sound designers and composers are working on new sounds and music. Story mode has a bunch of new interactions and UI which need some chill sound effects to give feedback as you make choices and uncover the story.
š” We have a shader artist contracted (the wonderful Crystal) to look into more dynamic lighting, but this wonāt be available for a little while yet! In the meantime she has been cleaning up and optimising all the shaders in the game!
Iāve been using the precision placement tools to make very cluttered bookcases.
ā On to beta news! Thank you so much for your patience. Our beta is going to be available to play to closed groups in the next few months! We still have some setup to do for this, as we will start testing in small groups before making it fully open to the whole mailing list. We will also have a Discord for the game opening up at the same time - so you can keep up to date with all the changes we will be making to the demo as you play it. ā
We are so, so very close to having something for you all to play. š Keep an ear out! š„°
Hope your weekends have been amazing!
Jess and the Momento team