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 made a spreadsheet, even! Thanks figgy!

Some of that rethinking was listening to the feedback we received here!

song by sodaboy64 it's not from the game lol

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.

Psst..!

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Hmm, It seems little buddy Rolus has been related to the holiday season since all the way back in 2020...