This post is mirrored from our recent Kickstarter update, and omits details about physical backer rewards.
Hello! It's been a little bit since the last update, and we've got some good stuff to share!
Let's jump into what we've been up to with MINDWAVE since the end of the Kickstarter campaign.
This update is written by both Megalo (Director + Main Artist) and mook (Project Manager + Systems Programmer).
👽 mook:
Our first priority was to figure out the business end of things. I sent out backer surveys, organized backer info, allowed backers with declined payments to pledge after the campaign, answered a bunch of Kickstarter messages, sorted out legal business, split the money up into different sub-budgets, and set up the ability to get ourselves paid.
This business stuff was easy on paper, but it was our first time ever doing this kind of thing, so it ended up a little more daunting once it was actually in front of us. It was a lot for all of us to figure out together, but we got through it!
Beyond business stuff, I fixed some bugs for the demo (the last patch was in April, and there may be even more bugs to fix?), and I helped manage our fan art contest. I set up the Google Form for voting, and I put together the winner announcement video. I also worked with the talented krz to make a bot to automatically(-ish) distribute roles to Kickstarter backers in our Discord server.
🌙 Megalo:
After the dust settled with business and post-Kickstarter work, we jumped right into development for the second minigame set in the game, Mind 2! Mind 2 was a weird one for a while. I always knew the general look and sound I wanted for this character’s minigame set, and a vague idea of what they represented to me. Until more recently, Mind 2 was always on the back burner in my mind.
Over the years, I had small concept doodles/ideas here and there, but what I wanted really started to click recently once we finally fully jumped in. Me and our gameplay programmer Milkshake have been working together to complete a bunch of the minigames for Mind 2, with my art and her implementation/added visual flair. Everything's been coming out great! With the work that’s gone into it, Mind 2 is already looking to be something really exciting!
🌙 Megalo:
In regards to the music for Mind 2, our musician Dorkus made 3 separate demos to try and nail the sound. The third one ended up being the one that fit really well for what we wanted, and he's in the middle of finishing it right now!
He’s been super awesome to work with and his musical range is super flexible, I think people will really like it when they play the stage and hear it. As for the other 2 scrapped demos, perhaps we’ll show them later down the line after the game is out?
🌙 Megalo:
The way that we've decided to approach the game right now is developing each Minigame set/Mind until they're in a passable alpha state. With the alpha state, not everything's finished and some minigames are missing, but it's playable and the main idea/tone is there.
After we finish getting into this alpha state for a minigame set, we move onto the next! This is to get us a big picture idea of the entire game/the flow of everything as early as possible, kinda like sketching out a big illustration to make sure the composition feels right before getting into more detail.
Right now we're finishing up Mind 2’s alpha state, and are easing into work for Mind 3! I’ve already been refining old concepts for Mind 3 on the side, and have been fleshing out the character with the writers! The process of making a minigame set has sped up a ton compared to where we were with Starlight (Mind 1) after the same amount of development time, and we’re proud of how far we’ve come with that!
🌙 Megalo:
As for other stuff I've worked on besides Kickstarter/Mind 2 work, I’ve updated some old moodboards for the other stages in the game, and I've thrown together some mockup/concept videos for some Minds and moments later in the game when inspiration strikes, in order to communicate the tone I wanna go for with them to the team. I've also fleshed out concept art for some of the other lobby floors in the game, designed some new faces to encounter in the lobby segments, and done some fleshing out of major story beats…
Speaking of the game's narrative! Me, mook, and our writers Starmy/Mizu have had a lot of meetings and talks about MINDWAVE’s story and characters, and a branch of what we've discussed is rethinking how we wanna approach writing the lobbies. We gave the writing a lot of attention to be ready for the demo, and we were happy a lot of people seemed to enjoy the narrative segments of the game!
But at the same time the demo was a great opportunity to shine a light on flaws we saw with these segments. It's a different experience watching regular people play the stuff you make, it puts stuff through a different lens. So without saying too much, Starmy and Mizu have been working on fleshing out how we approach each lobby to be more focused, and it’s already felt like it's been paying off! With the lobbies we're also experimenting a bit on the side in a different way with the help of a secret buddy of ours.... and it's looking pretty neat..... we'll have to see how it feels when it's done, though.
🌙 Megalo:
In terms of the story's big picture, it’s been shaping up to be something really special to me. Very early on in MINDWAVE’s development in 2023, I was unsure of what I wanted out of the game’s narrative, only knowing what major moments I wanted to include. The game was still very much an expression of myself and the things I loved but a lot of the details were blurry.
There was a point where I wasn’t really too concerned with how we presented the game outside of the minigame sets themselves. However, over the course of the demo's development, and even more as time went on, I found more ways to express myself through the narrative, and also put more of myself into the minigame sets. As time went on I became really attached to the games narrative and am really excited about the direction we have.
Part of this was because of my own major breakthroughs in how I thought about the game, but I feel like I also owe a lot of it to Starmy and Mizu for helping me flesh out the ideas I had, filling in the gaps between these major moments, and making it all make sense. They’re really fantastic at what they do, and help me know what I want out of the game’s story, and make me look at things differently in ways that make the experience of the game feel more personal overall!
👽 mook:
As for some of the more technical programming-y details, I've got some cool things to share.
I've started work on some big system reworks that'll allow the game to be made better and faster. Right now I'm working on what I call the "metagame system." It's built from scratch based on the best parts of the existing minigame system, and it works like an "engine-within-an-engine" that allows us to quickly swap between lightweight "scenes" which we use for both minigames and the "inbetween" score animations.
It can all run on a timeline that we place events on, similar to a video editing software. Here's what that looks like.
👽 mook:
While scenes have been functional for a while, the timeline system is still a bit new, so some of the visuals/functionality shown here are in-progress. Incorrect control prompt, no minigame command, no early finish for the minigames, etc.
Metagame: Controls the scoring and keeps track of certain variables between minigames
Timeline: Manages the order and timing of events (including minigames + inbetweens)
Scenes: The new system (based on the old minigame system) that minigames + inbetweens will be running on. Lightweight and self-contained!
Scenes are written with full backwards-compatibility with the old minigame system, so new minigames can still be programmed for the old system while the metagame system is in progress! It's important that big system reworks don't slow down the game's development.
The goal of the metagame/timeline/scene system is to allow us more freedom in how we make the game. The old system (which is present in the demo) was very rigid, and forced a specific flow between minigames and inbetweens, which meant that when we wanted to switch things up (such as with "Combo Time"), we had to jump through a lot of hoops to get those out-there ideas working.
Now that the system is opening up more, we'll have a lot more creative freedom to switch things up.
There's some other stuff on my systems implementation list, such as FMOD (as mentioned in a previous update), but we'll have to wait a little while before I can share the specifics there. I haven't even finished the metagame system yet! One step at a time.
👽 mook:
Dieback is a tool made by our friend Okano that lets you make your own EarthBound-esque wavy visuals using an artist-friendly interface with layers and sliders (since visuals like this usually have to be made by a programmer).
background of our new game over screen
👽 mook:
Dieback has been used a lot by Megalo throughout MINDWAVE's development to conceptualize certain visuals like the background of the main menu. The biggest issue has been that there wasn't direct GameMaker support for it, so we had to manually adjust the numbers for our own shaders until the result looked close enough to whatever mockup Megalo made using Dieback.
At a few points we had to compromise getting some backgrounds accurate to the mockups since it was time consuming (we spent multiple hours recreating Megalo's Dieback mockup for the main menu background).
Well, thanks to our pestering (lol), Okano has created a Dieback port for GameMaker! This means we'll be able to have Megalo's Dieback mockups no longer just be mockups! cool.
(just kidding it wasn't actually pestering, okano worked on it after i asked once. it was awesome)
"STITCH" microgame background as originally intended
"CATCH" microgame background as originally intended
Both Dieback and its GameMaker port are free, so you can use them too!
Check out Dieback on itch.io and give Okano's Bluesky a follow if you'd like!
For info on our physical backer rewards, read this post on Kickstarter!
🌙 Megalo:
That all being said, that's gonna be it for this update. We wanted to wait to have all the merch stuff ready before posting this, so it's a bit of a big update! All of us on the MINDWAVE team are really excited for what's to come with the game and we're really proud of the direction we've been in recently. None of it would be possible without the support of backers and followers of the game, so thank you guys so much!
Until next time!