Ok, actually, this has nothing to do with Valentine’s Day, it just happens to be tomorrow and I thought I’d mention it in the title. We don’t really celebrate it over here, either, it’s just an excuse for bars to have themed parties, so let’s get back to the business at hand: za game!

Last week has been pretty much business as usual: me painting backgrounds, Cami animating, Nicu polishing the lights and shadows shaders and re-testing the former demo area.  Other than re-painting the backgrounds and adding shadows to the former demo area – I mean what is playable in the demo – we’re also altering the puzzle design slightly, namely moving some objects around and changing the way some dialogue and interactions work.

See, here’s the trouble with the demo: it’s the first thing that I’ve ever designed for the game, so it carries certain 1st time blemishes. We’ve also launched it without it having been tested by anyone but ourselves, so a weird thing happened: our so-called play-testing sessions were watching people play it on youtube and screaming at the screen “noooo, you were supposed to–“… and, of course, realizing it was our fault, not theirs, that they were stuck.

It wasn’t necessarily major stuff, but we learned that signposting and making what is happening as clear to the player as possible is crucial. So if you got stuck during the demo, don’t worry, you won’t run into the same problems in the final game. By the way, here’s someone who didn’t get stuck :

What else have we been up to – well, I made this:

https://www.facebook.com/GibbousGame/videos/567703123427908/

 

Which got 4,000 views on facebook. Happy about that! It’s a stream I did  on our Twitch channel and compressed down to 5 minutes from 3 hours.

And this week-end I fiiiinally finished one of the most demanding backgrounds yet. Here’s a sneak peek:

And that’s that for this post! Back to painting and going over puzzles again.

Have a butt-kicking great week!

– Liviu