Hello, everyone!
Very happy to share the final character art for the main cast.
You can grab the full-size poster version from the press kit HERE.
I’m feeling incredibly fortunate that I found the folks at MLC Studio, who are super talented, engaged with the project, and come on a very solo-dev friendly budget. I mean, look at that!
The art is so good, that I’ve made updates to the Dialogue UI and HUD to get more of it on the screen. Over the next two months, the artists are going to help create a suite of portraits for you to choose for the main character, a stable of NPC portraits (that you might see more than once, I am on a budget here), and key NPCs whose narrative warrants a personal touch.
Even better, we’re currently testing out custom head models to capture the art style directly in the game world. Much more to come!
I mentioned in the roadmap that Cartha had some old content, and I felt it was important to revisit those quest designs, narratives, and other aspects that weren’t up to my current standard. I found a bit more to do there than I expected, so while progress has been great, it’s going to take me another week to round all of that into a build for playtesting.
Several of the in-game scenes needed to evolve as part of this, moving from the static diorama system I developed for taverns and camping, and into full environments that you can explore, have encounters in, and so on. The first hour of the game feels rich, and there are alternate paths that can yield different outcomes for different playstyles. It is starting to feel like players can have experiences that vary, which is one of the hallmarks of the genre that I think is mandatory.
As you can also see here, giving Skill Checks to party members is as simple as selecting them in the HUD. In some narrative situations, I make one of your characters roll, but often you can choose. Even better, your party members will appreciate being useful, giving them little Relationship bumps every time they successfully aid the party's progress!
I had hoped to get some design time in Act 2, but given the extra work in the starting area, that’s going to remain my focus. This will keep the Playtest schedule on track, which is the most important thing. I’m hopeful that I’ll get enough Portrait art in that time that I can update character creation to include it, and finally move off the placeholder art.
Prepare for a Closed Playtest. I've got Steam SDK and Analytics integrations working, and am putting the last major designed feature into the game. This is a system I've wanted to build for a while, a rich Bestiary that lets each character use their trained Skills in the first round of the fight to advance their knowledge of their enemies. Progress is tracked, and bonuses kick in after enough growth. So far it's pretty fun! A detailed update on this system is probably the next update.\[/strike]
The Playtest will focus on the first hour of the game, and I have a bit of work to do on the starting town of Cartha, its people, and a few of the quests. Much of the work here is complete, but I will spend two weeks here ensuring that each narrative choice has the right level of variety, that the writing is up to the current standard (some of Cartha was written as long as three years ago, and needs editing if not wholesale rewriting).
Finish Cartha re-design, implement updates to the Crafting System, and QA the Playtest build, covering each class across as many of the viable narrative paths as possible. Putting off Act 2 work for now, to prioritize the Playtest Build.
If all goes well, it's mid-August and I'm ready to start the Playtest. I'll be handling this via Steam Keys to the private playtest build, distributed on the Cat Lord Games Discord server. It's quiet there now, but maybe we can change that. The goal of the Playtest is to smoke out any deal breakers before this build turns into an official Demo.