Pre-release Update: Tunche gets better visuals, a narrative system and UI update

Hello!

Greetings from Lima, Perú once more. It has been a long while. This is Jorge, director of Tunche, ready to write the second to last devlog entry, which is also the last one for myself. Time does fly when you are busy.

Anyway, as most of you know, Tunche is reaching its release date. This also means the team is working extra hard on everything that might still be missing or that might need some extra polish time (which one can never have enough of)

In the middle of all this craziness, I want to take a few minutes to let you know what we were (or are) working on during these last few months of development as the game inches slowly towards its fans’ hands.

Without any further introductions, let’s start with the news:

Narrative System

A few months ago we released a devlog titled “The World of Tunche” in which I talked about the game’s story and its characters, and one of the things we spent a lot of time on during the last months of 2020 was making sure this story reaches the players.

Since Tunche is a rogue-lite game, the player will get stronger little by little until they can complete the whole game in one go. That means we expect the player to do many runs through the game until they are ready to defeat the final boss.

That also means we cannot expect to tell the whole story in a linear fashion and so we had to use a couple of special narrative resources. The first one is the “Story Room” which I already explained in the previous devlog and the other one is the use of our NPCs

Every time you go into the jungle and find a story room or manage to defeat a new boss, you will meet certain non-playable characters that will tell you more about what is going in the jungle and what Tunche’s role in all of this is.

This way, while each character’s story is fleshed out using Story Rooms and Lore Comics, the game’s main story will always be present in your runs. No matter if you choose to play as just one character or decide to level all of them up, you’ll still get to experience the central plot.

Graphical Polish

Those of you who played our latest demo, or our backer beta, already know Tunche is not entirely a 2D game. Our game uses a 3D world and 2D assets moving around it. This allows us to not only use Unity’s 3D collision detection, but also graphical effects that wouldn’t work as well in a flat environment.

However, with good comes the bad, and some of our older effects and sprites didn’t work quite well with the new 3D world. Lights and shadow especially proved to be quite tricky when it comes to working correctly on our flat sprites and effects.

Fortunately, after spending some time working on it, Tunche is looking better than ever.

New UI

One last change I want to mention, and maybe one of the biggest in the last few months, is our new UI. Thanks to the hard work of our graphic designer, Tunche’s user interface is far crispier and goes a lot better with the rest of the game’s visual style.

Using vibrant colors and clever information positioning, every interface in Tunche has been remade into something that we can be as proud of as the rest of our art assets. From the HUD (the heads up display showing each character’s life, mana, etc) to our dialog box and to each and every one of our NPC stores have been remade into something far prettier than before.

Even our “Pause Menu” has been redone completely and now sports a more dynamic look showing off our characters. I must also mention that each one of these interfaces come with an “opening” and “closing” animation so they won’t just appear on the screen, but make a grand entrance every time they are required by the player.

With all this said, there is still a lot of work to be done. Some systems still need a bit of tweaking, some art pieces need a bit of polishing and some pesky bugs still like to lurk around our code.

Our job isn’t finished yet, but we will keep on working as hard as we can during these last few months to make sure all of you get to play the best version of Tunche once the launch date is upon us. It has been a long hard road and many years of waiting, developing, and testing.

Before I wrap this devlog entry up, I just want to ask you to wait for the game just a little longer. Everyone at LEAP Games loves this project very much and we want to make sure that, once you get to play the final version, you will love it too.

We'll see you soon!
Stay safe.

Jorge - Tunche’s game director