Hello. It is me, Melos. What’s new in Angeline Era?
Are we announcing the release date?
No… not yet…
…But the game is coming out this year… so it seems the important news will soon come!
(See other devlogs here)
Pre-mortem
We’re in the last stretches of development. The stakes are high… it’s like the last game of a bowling tournament, or playing in the World Series. It’s the last time you can catch coding mistakes, make major revisions, and so on. But within that massive level of pressure there’s actually a sense of calmness because of the fact that the game is basically done and people have completed it.
So yeah, you’ll be playing Angeline Era this year! I am very excited to watch people play the game and react to its humor and drama (and bumpslashing!)
Actually, with the game unreleased I already know how well it will do. Based on wishlist numbers it should be our most popular game - conservatively, it’ll be at least twice as popular as Anodyne 2, and the sales will fund development (and hopefully other charitable things!) for a few years. Based on demo and playtester response, it will be a well-received game. It’s a challenging game, so I don’t think it’ll be ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’. It will likely be divisive. I look forward to the thoughtful critique, heartwarming praise, and the hilarious Backloggd rants gunning for a top 10 spot on my “Worst Reviews of my games of All Time” list.
Compared to my past games, I’ve seen people talking about it on random forums/social media here and there. Not a LOT, but more than zero. It’s not to the level where I think critical mass would develop.
Unless… unless… players get really into the characters Arkas, Tets, Niamh. I feel like there’s juuust enough there in the game that maybe we could see some fan art and stuff, especially with the twists in the stories. Maybe players will get into the humor and difficulty. Maybe we’ll see Blake Snell (Dodgers pitcher) experiencing the Bumpslash by the end of the year…
Honestly, I would be lying if I didn’t have a little Gambler Goblin somewhere in my soul thinking “Golden Ticket! Golden Ticket!” with each game release. But I try to silence the Goblin Inside and focus on realistic expectations (and finishing the game.)
So yes, if you’re a player or fan who has wishlisted and plans to play the game… thank you!
What’s Left?
A bit of enemy/npc art
Adding more environment art to most levels, like lighting, trees, rocks, hills, weeds, plants
A bit of level design polish (actually I finished this while writing this post)
A little bit of revision and additional text
Having about a dozen more testers go through the game, bugfixing
Testing the localizations once I receive them in a few weeks
Some miscellaneous work for uploading the OSTs
Release prep - trailers, press releases, Steam build reviews.
Development Updates!!!
Alpha Testing: We began alpha testing and had our first few players complete the game. They enjoyed it! An Alpha is a “mostly done” version of the game. There were a few wild softlock bugs here and there, but nothing too serious.
Since then we’ve been working towards Beta. In the past month we accomplished a lot:
Finished all the cutscenes! This was quite grueling, but the nice thing is once cutscenes are done, they’re done, and they generally work 100% of the time because it’s just things happening in sequence. Please enjoy them.
Did final edits and locked down most of the script to get our Chinese, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese localizations started
Brought on some long-time collaborators for marketing assistance
Finished all the level design (there was still a few things left as of September)
Some various art polish (some cooler boss deaths), some new SFX
Ran through the game quickly for stability checks
Wrapped up all the remaining Boss Art
Named the tracks on the Angeline Era OST
Final Design Pass: Search
So far I have finished 80% of a final design polish pass on the levels. (Actually I finished this while writing the post)
This is to make sure the base collisions are in place (during alpha there was a lot of missing random collision due to our workflow). But it’s also to tighten up a few things, which might be interesting to talk about while I’m doing it.
The general principle with this pass is to “unify the voice of the Search system and to accentuate personality of the levels”. What does that mean?
Unifying the voice of the Search System lets us then hide simple secrets. There’s certain cases in this game where it’s nice to have a search-activated teleport. You may recall this level from the demo, where you can Search the stump and it warps you.
The stump teleporters are by no means a “hard” secret - they’re obvious - but for these to read as something interactable, requires that we establish a consistent “voice” for the Search ability throughout the game.
The world map reinforces this, with the hidden levels:
The other way we reinforce this is through adding tiny rewards to “unimportant but suspicious spots”. However, the key philosophy I’m making consistent on my last design pass is because we decided to try and not intentionally place these spots. Instead, they’re just something we place rewards in if there’s a naturally weird part of the level geometry as a result of other design concerns.
For example, in this early-game level there just happens to be a blank spot next to these enemies, so we put some money there. (Part of this pass was also reducing the money rewards based on how the game economy is balanced - rewards in the previous alpha versions were generally way too high)
In many cases I’ve reduced/removed these spots if they feel too deliberate or frequent - the point is not to overwhelm you with a million hidden coins, but to ambiently have the Search action feel like it’s relevant/present to the player. That way, when time comes to use it to find something more relevant to the level design (like the above stump), the player is reading the environment with the search in mind. As Marina put it it’s to have a way to remove the underlying tension of a ‘spot in the level that feels a bit strange"‘.
Here’s an example of something that would feel overly deliberate unless it were to be hiding something more important (an NPC, a teleporter, etc)
Of course, the overall effect is an underlying scent of mystery on every screen of the game, even if we put nothing there. Part of me wonders about how the game would be if we had more and more things triggered by searches (there’s already a lot), but ultimately the voices of the levels are compelling along other avenues, not just the search.
I hope this search mechanic will be inspiring for everyone!
Final Design Pass: Accentuate the personality of the levels
The levels generally all have their own personalities (established much earlier on when doing my initial designs), but there’s way to accentuate or highlight spatial/artistic qualities of them. Of course, there’s the final art pass we’re still in the middle of (trees, environment art details, lighting). But there’s also some stuff more on the design side,
Additional Level Design: Sometimes levels felt they lacked a bit of ‘level design’ so I punched them up a bit by adding little bits of level design here or there (e.g. a room, or tweaking a room).
Searchable Secrets: Like mentioned above, there’s things I can trigger when searching: a sound effect, chains of teleporters, making an NPC appear, enemies, trees, etc… these just add a little spice of personality to the levels, and make the levels feel more established within the world of the game.
Random Enemies: It’s an action game, so sometimes the ‘spice’ needed is just dropping a few enemies here or there and tweaking their values or behavior.
Compost plots: Throughout the game you can obtain compost through various methods. Sometimes you can plant it in these squares and make a flower appear. This is mostly cosmetic but it’s a fun way to add a little something to levels where it makes sense to add.
Crates: Look, I’m not above the fun of just having something to bump around. I’m not stuffing these in to every single level, but sometimes there’s a spot in a level that’s just like “I need a crate, Melos…” and I’ll put a crate there.
On occasion, I’ve had very minor ideas that I’ll just add in because I think it can help characterize the level a bit more.
Final Design Pass: Collision
As our alpha testers (…and IGF judges playing the game right now!) know, the game is missing collision in some places here and there. (Since writing this, Melos has fixed the collision.)
The vast majority of collision in this game is automated. When we go from the greybox stage (right) to the basic art pass stage (left), we mostly use flood-fill tools to replace e.g. the brown boxes with “Blocker”-type cubes, which we then have another tool to generate the invisible walls (in green). Due to quirks of the cube-placing system, there’s occasionally some places the wrong Blocker appears, and we’ll be missing an invisible wall (e.g. there’s a missing one in the bottom of the left image). So I’ve been glancing through all the levels to clean these up (how fun!)
Melos News
It’s Melos News…
At the suggestion of a friend, I finally got over my 5 years of procrastination and put out one of my archival albums consisting of music from before/after Anodyne. Check it out! A lot of the songs use PxTone, a tool that Pixel made when developing Cave Story’s music.
This also inspired me to continue with other archival releases. I have a few still planned.
Layer 3 of the Great Tree Library of Melos - i.e., scraps from 2012-2019 (A completionist album, pretty much no completed songs, this would essentially be like a sketchbook)
Reissue of the outtakes/unused tracks from Even the Ocean (Tracks 90-168 on the OST lol). I relistened to these and really like them, I think they stylistically have their own vibe that is somewhere in between Anodyne and Even the Ocean. Since they’re tied to ETO’s massive postgame of unused level drafts, I thought there could be a fun opportunity to re-release these at some point and possibly commission some nice album art.
Compilation of unused tracks from All Our Asias (2018) Anodyne 2 (2019), Sephonie (2022), and one-off songs from 2020-2025 (only a few). I haven’t quite figured out how to organize this (lump them together? separate them for cleanliness?) but I’ll get to it (…in less than 5 years, I hope). Most of these are already released, but as .zip files linked on the respective OST’s bandcamp pages.
Of course, my next new music release will be Angeline Era’s OST. It’s 80+ songs, and somewhere between 2-3 hours of new music. It’ll be out in the days after the game’s release, eventually followed by a separate album of unused songs from the game.
After that I’ll be shifting focus to Danchi Days development + music, but I’d like to find time for some other compositional pursuits. I’d like to put out some other kind of standalone musical work - maybe a weird concept album (I have some strange Ideas), a more normal concept album, an album of classical guitar-inspired songs.
Can't wait to explore this world!
ooooooo exciting!!