Benjamin Friday – Lead Designer
Introduction
Hey everyone, today we are breaking the radio silence to give an update on what we are doing and have been doing these past few months!
Firstly, we are very happy to see our cozy community becoming cozier by the day with more people joining the server and garnering more wishlists for the game! We also want to thank those who played our demo during Steam’s Next fest and gave us some good feedback. Special shoutout to Nathan Dunton for being very active in our community and testing!
Next Fest
Next Fest gave us a lot of valuable experience as a team, it gave us a lot of insight in working with steam and gave us perspective on just how many things need to be done for our game before it’s ready for early access. Since Next Fest, we have been optimising our team’s workflow and how we approach solving issues as a team… so, let’s get into that!
Development
Recently, we had another programmer join our ranks to help with the massive task of ensuring our game functions as we intend it to (and more!). Our programmers Seb and Harry, are hard at work creating complex systems to allow the designers to be as creative as possible, and to cut a lot of time down later by creating effective tools now that allows us to create new enemies, weapons and other gameplay aspects much easier. Optimisation is always a priority for us as we want our game to be accessible to many people, so every step of the way the programming team is ensuring things run as smooth as possible.
Meanwhile the designers have reflected on the rooms and decided they were very limiting and uninteresting, so we have been hard at work nailing down new gameplay concepts and focusing on better level design and the core gameplay flow of Shattered Sun. Our UI and UX extraordinaire Mingus has been hard at work rigging and animating the enemies, including procedural animation to help make units feel more interactive and satisfying to play against.
In the art department, our very talented artist Isaac made improvements to the game’s lighting and has been working hard to create new enemies and fleshing out the level environments. Our goal is to make the factions feel more challenging to fight and make them more narratively and visually engaging. Below are some shots of our work in progress.
Going forward, we as a team want to be more communicative and honest with our community. This is our first game as an indie studio, and for some of us has been the longest project we’ve worked on (ever)! We have been trying hard to push through technical and design challenges so we can ensure our game is something you can be excited to experience.
As for our future plans and content, we are being very cautious with what we publicly discuss and show to the community as the last thing we want to do is over-promise and under-deliver. We are still learning as we go, so thanks to everyone who believes in us and our game!
Coming up, our Marketing Manager Adeena, is going to be doing a small Q&A to answer some of your questions about Shattered Sun! We would love to hear from the community and will be sending out a link (on our social media pages) shortly where you can submit all your questions. Keep an eye out for that!
Thanks for reading and we look forward to updating you again soon!
– Team Binaric
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