Weekly Update

Welcome back! Celebrate with a battle theme!

Why, hallo thar! Been a while, it feels, since we gave a development-style update. Chalk it up to the holiday season taking everyone away from the warm, glowing, warming glow of their computer screens and toward family-like things. As for me (NickyD), I went from Seattle to Atlanta, to a little place in Pennsylvania called Altoona, back to Atlanta, and will be back in Seattle around the time this goes live. What a trek!
Magic_FrenzyDuring my pseudo-vacation, I got to work directly with our UI/Battle Animation designer and complete several more animations: buffs/debuffs for STR, DEF, AGI, and DEX (strength, defense, evasion, and accuracy, respectively); basic elemental attacks for fire, wind, ice, and lightning; and discussed the plans for Linked Skill animations and some extra "juice" to give them even more style. We were looking at animations used in other games for reference — it was actually a lot of fun because we got to dig deep into our memories to recall which games had the attack animations that came to mind that truly represented…"wind," for example. There's not many other reasons to look at YouTube videos of Quest64, anyway… Full disclosure: that game is a guilty pleasure of mine. Anyway, above is a mish-mash of some of these animations: you've got Emily raising her STR, a crow with heightened AGI, and two enemies getting hit by wind and ice attacks. Sorry, no gifs this time; still trying to keep things a fun surprise for the demo!

Aside from battle animations, I had a few phone calls and email sessions with two music composers for the game. I want a lot of these tracks to remain a fun surprise for everyone who plays the demo when it's complete, but why not give you a sneak peek (or sneak…hearing) of the general battle theme? It's modeled after Japanese-style rock, sort of like what you'd hear in an Ys game or earlier SMT titles (DDS, Nocturne). This isn't the final mastered track, so what you'll hear in the demo will be a tad different; just an FYI!

Let's see, what else is new…? I've programmed most of the event scenes that take place in the chapter being considered for the game demo; it's a lot harder than I thought! When scenes have more than three characters in them — which the demo chapter does since it introduces most of the party — it's really tough to keep track of their positions on-screen, who gets swapped in and out, et cetera. The more personal or smaller-scale scenes were a snap in comparison. I did hit a snag at one point in limiting the number of choices a player can make in a given scene. In certain parts of the game, you only have time to make two choices from a larger set of options (think SMT: Devil Survivor, but without an actual clock) in order to learn more about the world, specific characters, et cetera. Anyway, in these sections, I asked the event scenario programmer to help me out and we developed a new way to get this to work. Now it's as easy as hitting a big red button!

I'd post a video of an actual scene showing this mechanic in play, but it'd show off another music track…and my travel laptop can't handle HD video capture too well. Guess you'll have to wait another week for that, sorry! Instead, above is a basic desktop recording of the internal debug scene we made to test the new limited choice mechanic. It's silly and fun! Yay!

Mr. Tired as a company is going to be diving deep into tax preparation this week, so depending how long that takes, we'll have one of two things to update you with next Tuesday. The ideal option is the unveiling of our Prefundia page! Speaking of, if you are a registered member of The Dungeon — our online forums — then you will notice that we've created a private topic in the Undead Darlings Dungeon where we can build the Prefundia page together in the coming days! It's like early access to an early access of a crowdfunding for a game's development! That's probably the deepest layer of "making a countdown to a countdown of an announcement" as you can get. So please! Register, come talk with us, and let's make sure that the game is described in such a way that you'll be more than willing to tell all your friends about it!

Teasing the New Year with our Undead Darlings

Welp, it's the holiday season around the globe, which means several of us involved in the development of Undead Darlings ~no cure for love~ are taking a bit of time to be with family, friends, loved ones, and/or not-quite-loved ones (but still loved when in their immediate presence because of the season). That said, we'd like to take a bit of time to chat about updates moving forward into the new year.

I (NickyD) absolutely love posting about every single asset we complete for the game. Since our last update, we've secured a number of 3D assets to build dungeons with, more attack animations (basic elemental Skills), several enemy characters, and even voice samples to decide on a "dream cast." I'm extremely grateful for all this stuff, so why aren't I showing it off to the world?

Well, it wouldn't make for a fun and interesting playable demo if you already knew everything that was going to be in it, would it? While still a couple of months away, we've been cracking our wrists, inviting the carpal tunnel demons to invade our keyboards, and have all been working really hard for — to pay homage to the OG Final Fantasy Tactics localization — l….i….t…….t……l…..e….. m…..o…….n……e……..y, to bring you a playable demo of the game.

Why? We want you to have faith that this project is going to be what we say it's going to be. We want you to believe that we know what we're doing (we do). More and more, I read news about mismanaged Kickstarters where the projects are delayed into oblivion, hundreds of thousands of dollars are used up with nothing to show for it, and it blends my icy cold heart into watery shreds. Over the past several months, I've been trying to think of ways to assure everyone that we're different from those projects; that we're serious about this and have no intentions of betraying your trust or expectations. The answer I came to can be boiled down to these points:

  • Keep everyone updated. Never go silent. Even if a handful of people read things I post, it serves as archival news to show anyone who comes along that we've been at this for a while and we're not stopping. You can talk directly to us and we will answer you without a layer of corporate BS.
  • In the same vein, engage with people. I love hearing why you play games, because we all enjoy the same games for different reasons. Those reasons are helpful when developing a game, so that I don't end up blindly following only what I find to be "fun" in a game. It's an organic process, and everyone involved so far has been given a high degree of creative freedom to leave their mark on this game. You can too, just by leaving a comment, liking or retweeting our stuff, or joining us to chat about whatever in The Dungeon.

  • Show that we can manage money. For the love of everything, nothing in the development process is more important than money management. Fortunately for me, business administration and financial management was a large part of my university education. It's impossible to place a monetary value on a game's scope unless you know what you're doing. Having an incredibly detailed breakdown is vital, and that's what you can expect from us. More on that in a sec…
  • Give people something tangible. Concept art is great and all, as is a trailer, arbitrary video messages from developers or staff…but letting you see, feel, and experience a part of what we're trying to create really pulls you into the process and lets you know that yes, this is a game. Yes, it is playable. Yes…is also a band.

So, to the main point of this update. We tried crowdfunding once before when the game was bare-bones in development, and we saw there was a lot of love and support for the concept, but it couldn't catch on because it really was too early in development to show off (plus the timing of launching around E3, and then Shenmue 3 happened, etc., etc.). Knowing this, we've put all our efforts into a vertical slice; a single-serving of the game to let you see a tiny part of what the full experience will be. A demo. This is what can be expected from our second crowdfunding effort. Your selfless investment (or pre-order, however you like to see it!) will help us to bring the game to fruition, and will also allow you to sample the game out, give feedback and ideas, and help to make the game even better. Crowdfunding someone else's game idea is awesome, but there's something special when you know that you can talk to us about what you liked/didn't like about the demo, and we are still able to bend our original ideas to incorporate those given to us by backers. I've fallen so deeply in love with development and design; I want to share it with you all in a totally platonic way, like an ass-out hug.

Here's the tease. I'm working on building a Prefundia page so that you can help us not only with the game's development via a playable demo (to come in a few months), but to make sure we're pricing the tiers to give you the confidence to back the title, where you prefer to back a title at (which crowdfunding site, etc), to give you the backer rewards that you want (and some outlandish ideas to test the waters with), and as an invitation to ask us anything about the game, our experience, how we'll spend the money, and why we think we can finish the game at the goal we set and at the estimated release date we give. In a future update, I'll link you all to the Prefundia page, which will serve to replace these Tuesday updates for a little while. It'll be more interactive and stuff!

I invite all of you to share this with everyone you know. People who know about us, people who don't know about us. People who like us, people who hate us. People who think you use money to light cigars with, and people who roll cigars to make a dollar. Thank you, and Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukkah, Kwanzaa, Sol Invictus, Pancha Ganapati, Hogswatch, Feast of Winter Veil, Yule…whatever you celebrate, have an awesome one.

Our Tuesday updates will resume on the 29th of December, but we're still going to post the Character Profile Series each Saturday!

Let’s Discuss Weapon Types and Basic Attacks

Oh, readers. Dear readers. Welcome. This week, we're bringing you some attack animations in GIF form in order to chat about the different weapons that the girls will make use of in Undead Darlings. Without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into them!

Read moreLet’s Discuss Weapon Types and Basic Attacks