Hello again everyone! Duhop here with the development update for September

Getting the demo ready for release has, as seems to be the norm with everything related to game dev, been a lot more work than I expected it to be. But thankfully we built in some buffer time before the release date, and after getting hard at work over the past month we’re still on track to have playtesting time and release the demo on October 25th with extra room to spare.

So what have we actually gotten done this month?

Key art and updated Steam page assets

Here’s something super exciting that’s probably best to just show you! Our new key marketing art for Alex’s Journey to the Grave:

I’m absolutely in love with it, and I really hope it strikes the same chord with everyone else interested in the game as well. We’ve also already gone ahead and updated the Steam page with new screenshots and new assets created using the new art, so check go that out too!

The character art here was done first by our character artist Paintedtrash, and the background was done afterward by our background artist JustEmmi. They’ll be working together on many more CGs in the full game, so this is an excellent example of how those will look!

The new UI

Our new UI assets are almost all done at this point, and programming the new UI has been my grind for the past week or so. Ren’Py does not exactly… natively support all of the features we decided on, so implementing the UI exactly as we planned it has proven to be a rather tedious process for me as a fairly inexperienced programmer.

A particularly difficult problem was figuring out how to save dialogue timestamps as a new variable in the dialogue object list… which I ended up skirting around in a super scuffed way by saving the timestamps inside the actual lines of dialogue and parsing them out before they’re displayed. There were a few more issues I had to address before this method worked properly, but despite how scuffed it is, I’m pretty confident that it won’t cause any more problems. (Fingers crossed)

In any case, I’m almost completely finished with programming the new UI now, and I do believe I’ve already overcome most of the challenges it had to offer. I’m really proud of how it turned out, and I think the new UI will be an amazing upgrade to the game’s user experience!

Background art

After my search began last month, a pair of new background artists has joined our team and been hard at work this month! The pair works on their backgrounds together, TurboUdon as a 3D modeler and UltraDynaMika as a 2D painter, and they quickly finished up the final background we needed for the demo before starting work on some of the backgrounds for Act 2 in the full game.

Their backgrounds are amazing, and they blended their style effortlessly to ours! Here’s some of the work they did for the demo this month:

Overall I’m happy with the progress we’ve made this month, and very happy to say that we’re still on track to release the demo on October 25th as planned! Despite the timelines not matching up exactly, I’m very glad to see that I’ve actually learnt my lesson about predicting release dates and making sure we have some buffer time.

Thanks so much for reading and checking in with Violet Horizons!

-Duhop