(artwork by @DavesToons)

WE HAVE A BOOTH AT TOOMANYGAMES!!

Swing by and play our new demo!! It's completely overhauled from the version you can play here on Newgrounds.

I don't want to spoil much, but it's got a few new areas, cutscenes, and just overall feels better to play.

We realized the Newgrounds demo didn't give enough context to the games story so we've been working on fleshing that out. Here's a clip of part of the intro:

In other news, we now have two programmers! @JasonTGF is now part of the team and I'm really thankful for him joining the hell that is Rolus dev. He's really helped smooth things along and he's smarter than me.

Discussing game design with him is always fruitful and he's really good at problem solving. Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around how say, an enemies AI should be implemented, or how different parts of the game should interact with each other, and he's great about figuring out the specific details. He's also really focused on how design impacts immersion, which is perfect for us, because we want to create a believable atmosphere.

That sounds vague, but immersion to me is tied to the game rules. When a game breaks it's own rules, it can take you out of the experience. For example, I greatly prefer in-game animations over pre-rendered cutscenes. We plan on having a fully animated intro, but once you get into the gameplay, you will never be pulled out of again... Once you're in, you're in. You follow the rules of the world, everything is top down, you experience the world through how Rolus interacts with it.

That might've been a bunch of word salad, but basically I wanted to say: Rolus is at it's best right now! The whole team has come together and has been working day by day to get this demo DONE!!! Hopefully we keep up the pace even after TMG.

Here's a cool bug that happened:

Also we redid the Trey boss fight, here's a look at phase 2:

https://imgur.com/a/24xtU75

Anyway, come meet us at TooManyGames!! I'll try to hit up the Newgrounds meetup! Anybody feel free to say hi at our booth :)

Please play our game... Please...