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:
This is my first news post where I've actually said something and not just dumped my doodles of the year so forgive me if it's not exactly eloquent.
This years been pretty long and wild, I kinda forgot that we released the demo to our game on here this year! It feels like we released it and then I completely forgot it wasn't always on the site. If you haven't played it yet, you can check it out here:
For most of this year, I unfortunately neglected working on the game.... After being a hermit for most of my life, this year I ended up getting sun and experiencing life a bit.
I went to school for a semester, (now I'm not going to school), I met one of my closest friends irl for the first time, and I spent most of the year travelling about with my partner.
However, all that time spent not working on the game gave me some room to re-evaluate the games' priorities along with the team, and for the past ~3 months we've been really strapping down and figuring shit out!
We noticed many people said the game felt sluggish, and a big part of that was probably the camera system and the gun feel.
I really loved the classic Zelda style screen transitions since it forced us to think about the composition of each screen, which made me against the idea of having a following camera.
However, our programmer, Wasabi, decided to mix the two systems.
Important locales will still have a transition, but there's also open areas where the camera follows you freely.
Doing this GREATLY improved the pacing! It feels so much better to move around without being paused by the camera scroll, something that is less of an issue in Zelda because they don't have giant fuckin sprites like us.
We also decided to juice up the gun, changing the graphics and sounds, and adding shell casing.
(You can barely notice but I also redrew it so it recoils as he shoots..)
Changing all this shit also introduced it's own new problems, like the enemy AI only working when the camera was restricted.. so we had to fix all of that.
Anyway, I want to get out of polishing hell! Really bad!!
So currently we've been working on fleshing out Rolus's moveset, as we realized pea-shooting isn't gonna carry the whole game.
This game is never going to be that complex, but I really want to introduce fun items as the game goes on, stuff that you haven't seen out of a Zelda game, too.
But I don't want to spoil any of that! So here's a look at a normal mechanic that is already from Zelda games:
At the end of the day though, the game is supposed to be character driven. I feel like the demo unfortunately does not convey this enough! I mostly want the player to enjoy the world that's been living in my teams' head for almost 3 years... I want to take them along our ride.
I realized only about half the people who reviewed the game truly got the premise.
Fortunately we got a lot of compliments on the atmosphere, but it's a shame that a lot of people didn't really get that Rolus' goal was getting money for a burger. And I don't blame them!! It's barely a focus of the demo! I just assumed people would get it even tho we hadn't gotten around to doing the set-up.
The main antagonist only appears once in the whole thing and it was kind of a eureka moment when I realized that was a major issue.
You sort of get blinded by these things when you're drawing shit privately for years on end.. you lose sight of how to get others to understand you.
If you'd like a taste of the characters while waiting, you can read my comics that I post.. right here!! On Newgrounds!
Out of season, but 4 pages:
Currently in season.. only 1 page:
In short, for the past 3ish months we've been working on setting the foundation to work consistently throughout 2024.
I thought Newgrounds was the perfect audience for our game, I think it probably still is?
However, I don't know if we'll ever post a new demo here, it was kind of a bitch to have the game run on the site.
I wonder how many people clicked off the game due to how long it takes to load... ?
(we did fenagling to have the windows version of the game run inside your browser.. which gives a huge bootup load time but otherwise way way better performance than what html5 export in GMS2 would allow. thx tom fulp for answering one of our questions one time)
Future demo will probably be on itch, alongside - fingers crossed - in person at TooManyGames in Oaks PA...
Also stay tuned for when @PostElvis posts the Rolus demo OST to Spotify. And listen to his other music while you wait, cuz it's killer. He made released a 3 hour album this year that went under the radar. Listen to that shit while you draw or animate or something.
As for a Newgrounds release, we were planning on having it dual release with SAGE, but we realized that this game would not be easy to optimize for browser.
So later down the road we're going to figure out how to get a version of Rolus on Newgrounds.
The game was originally going to be entirely on Newgrounds but we slowly got more ambitious and realized it had to be a full game that would eventually release on Steam, but I love this site as a platform for indie games so I really want to get a release on here at some point.
Whether it's this demo or something uniquely tailored to the site, it'll be here eventually.
Thanks to my bestest friends for working on the game with me!:
