We’re back! Our holiday to Japan was full of delicious food, cycling around volcanoes, visiting shrines, and watching baseball and sumo wrestling tournaments. Coming back to a Darwin that was in full swing of dry season was wonderful; going back to work rather than being out enjoying it was less good, but we gotta pay the bills somehow. 🤑
As expected, it’s taken us a little while to get back in the swing of things after such a big trip. But we do have some positive news in the form of a conceptual development grant from Screen Territory! These grants are designed to help those developers like ourselves that are in pre-production (and even pre-conceptualisation) stages. We’re more in the camp of being in pre-production so this will help us to pay Louise a (small, but positive) wage and get some of the software and assets that we may need to finalise our concept. We’re incredibly grateful for the support; it’s such a confidence booster and gives us a lot of motivation in the form of things like due dates and acquittal requirements.
Besides that, the NT community recently had one of its major events: Geekfest 2024! Geekfest is an initiative from the City of Palmerston where a bunch of creators, creatives, stall-holders, and, yes, game developers get to show off their talents. This year we had the first opportunity to show a couple of game jam games of ours (MinerTaur and, briefly, PalmerSLAM!) and it was really neat to see people try our game, even for a little while, and get a couple of smiles and high score chases between mates.
Nothing else too much to share this month. Our main priorities at the moment are refining the gameplay of our concept and really nailing down the theme and (mostly) final art style. Louise has been cooking up some more psychedelic styles of environments and characters into something we’re referring to as ‘cosmic outback’ which hopefully looks as good as it sounds. Now that I’m somewhat happy with the cave generation system, I’ve turned my attention to enemy AI and using a State Charts system to make it a bit easier to handle. Our aim with the next update will be to be able to show at least one enemy and a few new environmental art pieces. Wish us luck!