Angeline Era Devlog (2025/09) / Analgesic Game 6 News/Melos News

Angeline Era coming this year!

What happened this month in Angeline Era? The most important is that we worked through finalizing most of the game’s important story events - e.g. the ending, other climactic moments. This was nice because some of these story ideas had been sitting around as only dialogue for maybe over a year!

On Marina’s side, this was a thorough process of just going through missing events and scenes and doing the art needed. I believe that having a lot of existing art for the game helped as well, as she could re-use existing textures and models.

Enjoy this little preview of the first 10 seconds of the game, before any music kicks in.

Watch out for fish!

As far as the process of doing these scenes went, it’s always kind of a mentally tedious experience because cutscenes are where programming, art, stage directions, music, sfx, choreography all intersect. Thankfully, the cutscene editor tool I made years ago (and have used in Danchi Days) really came in handy here. Thanks, past me!

Oh, we also finally made the world map. We still want to draw on some of the main roads, but as you can see, the world map appears in chunks and it only indicates some main important locations, after you’ve found them. For the most part, you’ll need to figure out your way on your own…

Those cutscenes and related work took up most of the past month.

But I also got a bunch of miscellaneous things done…

List of Miscellaneous Things I Did

• Got the ball rolling on album art, started figuring out OST track order and song titles

• Slightly tweak the money economy

• Consolidate the config file into 1 file, not 3 separate ones per save file

• Emission flickers now work on mesh renderers with two materials. I am amazed this was overlooked until Tets was glowing in a cutscene and only his right shoe wasn’t lighting up.

• Freshened up the Steam store page

• Hooked up all remaining minor NPC animations/models

• Added most missing item icons

• Implemented the optional Boss Fight mode … which features a minimal but still interesting scoring system! Can you beat all the bosses without dying? How about on high difficulties… or while trying to score high? Each boss has a maximum score, and the faster you hit the boss or other things - the more your combo will go up. So scoring high is a matter of trying to maximize the combo (which might make you play in a non-standard manner) while trying to finish things semi-timely. And in the full boss rush, the combo carries over between fights…

  • Boss Fight mode also tracks your best times in case you prefer speedrunning stuff.

• Added a debug menu, which will be handy for testing - lets me warp around the game, gain items, etc. The debug menu idea came from Danchi Days where we really needed a way to skip to different parts of the game.

• Got the game uploaded/working on Steam again, as well as implemented achievements (ugh). I did find a way to make the achievements not too intrusive, though.

• Various other coding fixes related to continuity in the late game. This was important because of…

Alpha Testing!

We officially started alpha testing with a small group of players. They’re playing through the “mostly, but clearly not done” version of the game. This is mainly to spread out the intensity of bugfixing over a couple of months rather than in one cramped sprint near release. It will also be helpful to see if there’s anything we overlooked regarding the game’s pacing and scale. Worth noting, is that a good amount of bugfixing was finished with the earlier stage (2024) of releasing the demo. So I actually expect most of the problems with the alpha/eventual beta versions will be subtler balance tweaks or weird edge cases.

Still, there is a bit of work left to do with cutscenes, level art, and a few SFX. I think there’s a few enemy/boss models left to do.

But we expect to finish that over the next two months… and then…

Release?

We do have an internal release date goal in mind! But we’re keeping it hidden… because some winter showcases want exclusive info, haha. So I can’t say anything beyond what is public, which is the previously-announced Q4 2025 release window. Stay tuned!

Analgesic News

Nothing too big other than Angeline Era coming soon! Well, Even the Ocean’s 9th (9??? really????) anniversary is coming up in November.

We started brainstorming plans for our next game! Nothing really definite or prototyped but some aspects have been inspired by the various prototypes/ideas I’ve been tossing around over the past years, which can broadly be connected by an interest in nonstandard representations of space. Maybe I’ll post about this in the future if we work more on it. Currently some themes we’ve been tossing around

• The blurriness between “user interface” and “level geometry”. If a platform in a 3D platformer conveys something about how you can use that platform to traverse, then technically that 3D platform could be considered to convey information in the same way a health bar does.

• Non-humanoid player character. Our games often feature supernatural forces (Sephonie, The Center, Humus), but you don’t actually inhabit their perspective.

• “Panes” - what are ways of representing the world beyond literally representing it through a normal camera view? For example, in this mockup you would never see the continuous world, but you could experience it more with your imagination. This is of particular interest to me because historically, maps were not physically accurate in the way Google Maps was. That is, for the majority of human history we haven’t been navigating or relating to our environment through precisely measured coordinates. It could be interesting to explore that - not just through nonstandard maps (e.g. a hand-drawn map), but also through non-standard spatialities.

For example, Danchi Days uses a grid-based board as a particular abstraction to communicate certain types of sensory experiences:

Sephonie uses a grid-based board to communicate the feeling and emotions of interacting with creatures:

In this prototype, the color of tiles around you affects how the room looks the next time:

We think that some kind of game focused around panes with different sorts of abstractions in the panes, could be a neat way to convey a world. One interesting idea is that the panes are kind of like party members - and their panes give you one (abstract) window into the world. So how would a game be where your info about the world is limited to who you’re with?

Anyways, it’s all very vague… but I’m hoping to somehow tie it to some interests in relationality (the sense that we’re not best understood as individuals, but we’re a collection of relationships with other people/places/things). What would a game look like that tries to explore this logic?

I’d also like to explore a game that is less based around single main endings and more on different outcomes. Actually, some thinking is running parallel to traditional rogue-likes, CRPGs or interactive fiction. We’ll see how things pan out!

Melos News

Aren’t you glad you continued to peruse?

It’s time for Melos News.

• I did an interview with the Japan Times! https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2025/09/12/our-lives/melos-han-tani-game-designer/

• I also did an interview on Angeline Era with ys-link.net, a Ys fan site! https://www.ys-link.net/blog/2025/09/16/an-interview-with-the-creators-of-angeline-era/

• I saw Mt. Fuji in person. It’s really really big… it’s hard to convey the bigness… basically, it just goes…

  

  And goes… and goes…

With a telescope I was able to get a shot of some of the waystations:

What’s unique about the bigness - and no doubt a source of various Mt. Fuji worship sects - is that it is just sticking out of the landscape. It conveys a subtle wave of pressure and presence when you look at it.

Over at a historical park for Nenba (a town destroyed in a flood in the 60s/70s), there was an impressive 3D composite photograph of the region. The lakes near Mt. Fuji are especially interesting to see in person - they have the appearance of chain of islands, except that you’re way above sea level.

I do have a bunch of books/articles/etc to talk about, but I think that’s all for now.