Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #47

Hey all, back with the 47th development log for the studio. For this update, we're going to talk about progress on our games and infrastructure for the studio. A lot of this might be a bit boring if you're not interested in what goes on under the hood, but I guess the point of a development log isn't really to entertain but instead talk about what's going on. Anyhow...

Selatria

Progress on the Selatria project is going well. The most difficult aspect of the project is still managing the large amount of voices, what needs to be done, and what needs to be re-cast and re-recorded. Shadoe, the sound engineer of the project, has taken to going through the last main character's voices and sending me a list of what needs to be retaken there. While I go through the long backlog of voices for side characters and recurring characters and approve/send emails out as needed. Here are some new screenshots from Chapter 4.

The new cutscene developer Donald Alfieri has come up with the basis for a lot of these new cutscenes for the second half.

Changes to Shopkeeper:


Currently Shopkeeper can die based off the player's actions or if they're careless or don't choose to buy goods from them based off the previous actions.

I was ignorant to some very negative tropes that this contributes to and I'm making some changes and what I feel are needed retcons to the character. We've begun work already on some of the points you see below, and all of these are going to be implemented by the time Selatria is ready for release. For future games, I want to do better on this and do better research on people of different backgrounds/orientations/communities so something like this doesn't happen again. I personally feel embarrassed that I didn't know about these aspects of the community and I want to make sure it gets changed.


Negatives removed/planned:


• Removed "Shopkeeper's Dying Will" item that would appear in wherever you let him die.

• Removed permadeath aspect. You will be able to see Shopkeeper in every scene he's supposed to be involved in.

• For places where his bones used to be if you let him die, it will just be nothing there assuming he somehow escaped or got free.


Positives planned:

• A "rewards" like system for if you buy the goods and stop him from getting angry, you get permanent discounts on his wares starting at 5% per positive interaction to a 25% discount cap

We have more additional further changes in mind to the Shopkeeper character, and we'll announce them as they become available.

Dastardly Dairy Debacle

We're still making some progress on The Dastardly Dairy Debacle, but there's some last minute hiccups before we can bring it to Google Play. More information on this game will be in next month's development log.

Improving the infrastructure/implementing proper source control

Up until now, we've been using Dropbox and Google Drive for our version control for game development. (I know, really bad/amateurish on our end.) While we've attempted to use more professional version control like GitHub, we've noticed it was rejecting some of the assets for our project that wasn't code-related, so that wouldn't work for us.

After messing with Perforce and trying to get in contact with them for the Indie Studio pack and having to jump through hoops and emails to get a price point, we've settled on Plastic SCM/Gluon for the version/source control tool for the studio. I wanted to make sure we got a tool that everyone can use without it being a hassle, and I'm really happy we settled on the choice. I thought I was going to have to fight to get this all set up but it was extremely easy and straightforward. Why didn't we use this sooner?

We ended up going for the Cloud Server option for us.

E3 and future conventions

E3 was handled a lot better this year than it has in previous years. While the industry only hours, there was time to actually get some dedicated playtime in but it wasn't enough of a time block to be able to see everything. (Each popular game was a multi-hour wait, even including industry credentials.) I hope next year they take more of a stance similar to Tokyo Game Show and have an industry-only day and then two full days for the public. That would be the best compromise to making the exhibition a better event.

For future conventions and events, some of us will be at the Las Vegas game jam next weekend and Gameacon Las Vegas at the end of the year. Next, Salt Lake Gaming Con? LVLUPEXPO 2019? More to come in the next development log.

Until next time!

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #46 [E3 2018 Edition]

Hey all - back with a new development log. Pre-E3 edition. For this June update, I wanted to make sure we had our own big announcements to show to go with E3.

Selatria

After seven years of development on the game, we are finally going to be completing our work on Selatria. We are currently aiming for a release date in late-2019 for the full Selatria game. As promised before, any progress from Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire will be compatible with the full final release. Here is some promotional art and some new screenshots!

To accompany this announcement, we have a few new people on the main team to introduce or switched their roles. Donald Alfieri has been brought onto the team in the past year to join me on mapping and designing the cutscene movements and porting in the script for Part 2. We still have two more sections of script to port in for the main scenario before we can consider that leg finished and move 100% of our effort to cutscene designs. Dominique Hodnett is a brand-new addition to our team, and we have been working together on Wednesday nights and Saturdays to complete the content of Mage's journal and some side stories involving the main characters you will get to experience in Part 2. Leigh-anna Griswould has been behind the implementation of the voices into the cutscenes, and last but not least, Timothy Blanchet has been behind the scripting of some of the new features that you will see explained below.

Some new features:

-The journal will now open automatically to the newest page. As mentioned in the last post, we now will have an indicator that briefly popups when the journal is updated. When selecting the journal from the main menu or the items section, it will now highlight Mage's current thoughts dependent on your progress. I feel this will be good for players who take a long break between play sessions or are waiting for the new release and forgot where they needed to go.

-Quick Save will also be coming in with the 2019 update. Quick save will allow for shorter play sessions by being able to save and close the game at any time. However, when a quick save is loaded, that data is deleted from memory. This was a requested feature from different forums given that most games these days have save anywhere functionality. But due to the nature of the game, we don't want to have our players stuck in a situation they can't get out of. So we set up a compromise and implemented Quick Save.

Also to note, you will start to see more video footage from upcoming scenes that our team has worked on implementing, and I will be cross posting this to our new forums and on our Steam discussion board.

Regarding the new release date: Previously I have been concerned about giving away release date windows due to naively announcing an August 2012 release date for the full game back when we started.  Since then, we have better project management protocols in place and up-to-date metrics on where we are and what we need to do to be able to get there. I feel we've gotten to the point that if we can't finish it in the next year, it will simply never get done. I'm really hoping you'll continue to support this project as you have been as we go into our final year of development. For those of you who have supported us on Indiegogo, we will be making further announcements for physical rewards and fulfillment before the end of this year.


The Dastardly Dairy Debacle

After a few months of fixing issues and pushing back on release for The Dastardly Dairy Debacle, we're currently doing final checks on content implementation and we are aiming for a new release of this summer. For now, we've uploaded a new theme from the game, so please take a listen. Please also take a look at some new screenshots as well as a new song composed by Christopher Nuño!

We also have a new Whim Indie interview available regarding music creation and a new interview by Jabari for the J-Tendo show (if you haven't seen it yet).





Before we end for this month's update, I'd like to show some highlights from our time at LVLUPEXPO this year. We had a great turnout and we hope to demonstrate our games at the convention next year as well.

That's it for this update. See you next month or at the E3 show floor!

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #45

Hey everyone! Thanks for reading the 45th development log, for the month of April.

Selatria

Since the last development log, we have hit a milestone, 80% complete of development!

80 percent complete with development! Woo!

A lot of this is attributed to the art development which we will finally be wrapping up in the next few weeks. The next big hurdles are getting the rest of the dialogue ported into the game for the final chapter and the voices of Mage, Melanie, Saewo, and Gobby for the last few chapters. As for the design being 0%, that's a category we haven't really used until recently with planning out the equipment for the characters for the last two chapters. Until recently, we've just lumped it in with the programming.

Due to a lot of work involving porting in the script, there's not a lot particularly interesting to show for the development, but we did address some quality of life improvements. First of which (below)

A window now appears when the Journal is updated. This is still subject to change.

Every time the journal gets updated, a notification will appear like the above. (The way this looks isn't necessarily final). I am wondering if this will confuse players thinking the game auto saved in the journal as opposed to letting them know where to go in the menu got updated. If you have a better idea on how to phrase the difference, feel free to send me a message or leave a comment on the forums.

If you're confused on where to go, the journal now auto-navigates to the newest written page

Another quality of life improvement for the journal is that the cursor will automatically now go to the newest page that has been updated. This will hopefully make navigating and figuring out where to go when the game has been put down for an extended amount of time much easier. Both of these updates will be implemented alongside the release of the full game/Part 2.

The Dastardly Dairy Debacle 

So we've been having a few technical difficulties with the development of Dastardly Dairy Debacle, and we want to hold off releasing it until we fix a few more critical bugs and fix some of the game balance issues. More to come on that in a future update!

Website Improvements!

We've made some improvements to our website and some of our web development interns implemented an initial build of our forums.  Instead of reporting bugs via email, we hope to have this available so other people can visit and comment with their finds. Feel free to give us feedback, report anything, or even say hi over there.

LVLUPEXPO

This year's LVLUPEXPO will be at the Las Vegas Convention Center on May  4-6, 2018. We will be demonstrating Selatria, ANTics, and possibly The Dastardly Dairy Debacle there. If you're in or plan on visiting Las Vegas, please visit us! You may win one of these!

You can purchase tickets to LVLUPEXPO here.

 

Whim Indie - Behind the Scenes: Episode #5

And finally, we'll end with a new behind-the-scenes video with Jabari interviewing Shadoe about sound engineering for Selatria. It's a continuation of one of the past episodes on the topic so check it out.

 

That's all for this one. Until next time. Hope to see you at LVLUPEXPO the forums, or in the next development log!

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #42

Hey readers, thanks for reading the 42nd development log, the final one for 2017.

Selatria

 

To start off! We've obtained the domain www.selatria.com ! For now, it will re-direct to the Selatria page on our whimindie website, but we have plans to make this either a full-blown page in itself, or re-arrange the Selatria page on the whimindie website to look less cluttered and more pleasing, especially as we get closer to completing Part 2.

Speaking of Part 2, development is ongoing. After a few months and several re-designs, we got the base of The Endless Desert, one of the prominent dungeons to take place in Chapter 4. The next big part of development will be working on branching paths. Unlike previous chapters in Selatria, the second part of Chapter 4 will involve being able to do certain events in any order.

This content is not final and is subject to change.

We have put the Endless Desert in closed alpha testing this weekend for our in-house testers in order to fix bugs while we begin eventing out the next section.

Airship Concept Art - Art by Deborah Groves

Everett - Art by Deborah Groves

This is the first look at the airship that will be featured in Selatria. The design is modeled after a flying fish as well as after the head engineer who created it., Sir Everett. If you've played Selatria Advent, you saw a small cut-scene featuring him at the very end of Chapter 3.
 
On a last note, I had a meeting yesterday in Los Angeles to begin talks about arranging our midi sound files and turn them into a full blown, 112-track soundtrack that will launch alongside the full game. We're beginning talks with the music team involved with the creation of the main game music to see what will work in terms of revenue split, and I hope to have more information as we go on into the new year. 


In 2018, we'll be showing off more characters and special monsters that will be appearing in Part 2. Stay tuned!


Selatria will be going for $1.24 on Steam throughout Black Friday to Cyber Monday. Give it a buy and play through if you haven't. We welcome all reviews and feedback.

Working with SSD Studio for more sound effects!

 

Since this month, we've been working with SSD Studio, a small sound/audio company based out of Poland and they've been working on some new awesome sound effects to finish off Selatria's development.

You can also check them out on Facebook.

Appearances at the Reboot Game Lounge!

 

If you're in the Las Vegas area, catch us at the Reboot Game Lounge! Most months, we'll be making an appearance during their anime and game nights. We're going to be using that as a first place to test our new Selatria builds and new content out to the public before we release it, so if you want to get a first play at what's coming, check us out if you're in the area during their events! We'll also be showing off future games in development here too.

You can check out their upcoming events on their Facebook page.

LVL Up Expo 2018

 

We're also gearing up for our next big demonstration, LVL Up Expo 2018 which we will have some big announcements regarding Part 2 of Selatria. If you're in the Las Vegas area, come stop by and say hello and check out our indie dev booth. More details to come in the coming months. Our last appearance at the 2017 LVL Up Expo was very positive and we were able to get a lot of valuable feedback and new fans, and we want to do it again next year.

You can buy tickets for LVL Up Expo at their website.

If you're an indie developer, you can apply to exhibit their show as well.

The Dastardly Dairy Debacle

 

Unfortunately, due to some issues in the project, we have decided to postpone the release of our next immediate game Dastardly Dairy Debacle into the Winter. This will be a small side story that will be downloadable for free for PC if you own a copy of Selatria already, and will be available for Android devices as well.

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That's about it for this development log. Have a happy holidays and I'll see you in 2018.