2020/03/29 Status Update

Overview

For this week's update, we have so much to share with you! You can listen to soundtracks and themes we've been working on over the last couple of weeks as well as more character concept art we are iterating on. Also, for our mailing list subscribers, we have some news about our first playtest!

Goals

Showcase the game

Key Results:

• Apply to MAGFest Indie Videogame Showcase @ AwesomeCon 2020
  • This event has been postponed to December this year. We will look into submitting for the event closer to the new deadline.
• Apply to GameScape (Deadline: March 31st, 2020)
  • This Tuesday we will submit our game for this event.
• Demo at CCBC Tech and Gaming Expo (Event: April 25th, 2020)

A rising concern with this goal is the COVID-19 outbreak and its consequences for large group gatherings and school closures. We are keeping a close eye on this developing situation and understand if some events end up postponing or canceling as a result.

Playtesting

In tandem with submitting to GameScape, we want to build out our pipeline for producing builds of the game and sharing them out to friends, family, and players that are interested in trying it out. As a part of that, we have a mailing list that you can sign up for to stay up to date with future playtests.

Recent News

Character Art Commission

We continued to work with Zac (@_sneb_) on fleshing out more character concept art for our seven characters. This week Zac took on five of the characters that will appear in our first episode and playtest build.

Annabel

From the first design, we wanted to address her character's body proportions, height and leg wear.

Dante

We are very happy with where Dante's design is ending up. The character design helps to reinforce some of the background themes for this character, being both a fiend of an EMT as well as still maturing as a person.

ZJ

From the first design to the current design, we wanted to address the hairstyle and blocky style and hone into a more grounded look. We are still figuring out what to do with their arms.

Billy / William

We liked the original silhouette for this character's design. While we personally liked the first concept, we felt that it would make the character less relatable and lost some of the silhouette we originally had.

With the new design, and with shorter character in general, one thing we will have to consider is where their eyes are looking relative to other characters.

Stephanie

We feel like this design successfully conveys the anxiety this character has after her experiences in the episode as well as her concern for how her child Billy is doing.

The biggest consideration with her design is whether to reflect some of the afflictions the player helps her with earlier in the episode.

Future Plans

Deadline

We are planning to submit for GameScape on Tuesday, March 31st. For that submission, we plan to have all of our concept character art, music and updated script in the game.

First Playtest

With building out our build pipeline, and getting a build to a state that we feel like we can submit it, we want to send it out to our mailing list! We will be hosting the build in Itch.IO for Mac OSX and Windows. We will be figuring out distribution as well as sending a survey along side the build. Subscribe to our mailing list below to be a part of the playtest! We will send more details via the mailing list very soon.

The End

If you have any questions, comments, feedback for me, you can email at zappy@ravenheartgames.com.

If you like this post, you can see more in the Devlog section or check out last week's post

Once again, if you are interested in playtesting builds of the game or future updates, you can click the button below!