Hey all! Wow, its been awhile since our last update. Sorry about that. Yesterday as part of our degree we had a beta playtest in college! It went really well and we can't wait to share a public beta release with you all. While we found a lot of issues that our game has right now, we also feel really confident in what we have made so far. With a bit more polish our game will end up in a really good place by the end of our degree.

After our beta the team took a break to recover which delayed us in our posts. Starting this Thursday we will be back to our usual posting schedule! 

This week we want to share a bunch of information about where the game is now and how the beta went! We got a ton of playtest feedback and a bunch of people playing our game! Overall the reception was really positive! While our game has a bunch of clarity issues right now, we have a clear direction for improving the player experience and polishing the experience!

Development!

So! What have I done since our last update! Well a lot has changed. Apart from a LOT of bug fixing, we implemented a ton of quality of life changes and small features.

We made some improvements on our combat camera, now adding the ability to rotate the camera around Oscar to get different angles on the action! You can see a short example here: https://youtu.be/RkTbkYD7jEs

Additionally, we added the ability to heal outside of battle whenever you eat some dog food from the kitchen!

We also added new pawprints when moving in combat! Its much more charming then our old and scuffed arrows that we used to indicate where Oscar will be moving to.

Assets and Concept Art

A lot of the art team this week has been working on some final touches for the game! We don't want to show you too much as a lot of it is either concept art, or something we want to let you discover for the first time while playing the game! What we can say is that apart from just asset development, we have been doing a lot of work on our cutscenes this week! We have a few planned cutscenes and without spoiling to much, we want to show you this concept we have for one of our cutscenes!

Additionally, we have another piece of art we would love to show you! Our wonderful art team has been hard at working making our game look as good as possible, and they have an absolutely adorable image to show you guys this week! We cant send the full file size thanks to the upload limit on Itch, so if you want to see the full image then youll have to play our beta when its uploaded!

Sorry for the delay!

We also want to really quickly apologise for how long the beta has taken to be shared! Right now the team, while satisfied with the playtest results, aren't satisfied with the current state of the game for a more public release! While we want you all to have the opportunity to play our game as soon as possible, we also dont want to release it too early and end up ruining the experience for some players with an unfinished version. With that said, we want to get a beta to you as soon as possible, and we are hard at work doing just that!

This might not seem like much since our previous post, but this is just the stuff we added before our beta release! We have another devblog coming back on schedule this Thursday to fill you in on everything we have done since then. Until that devblog, have a wonderful day and look forward to a public version of our beta!