Angeline Era Devlog (June 2025)
Welcome, Bumpslashers… to another Angeline Era Devlog Update. I guess the last time I did one (September 2024) I decided it was easier to make a video? Now I would rather type. Ha ha.
First of all, the game’s coming out in Q4 2025!!! (…probably) Maybe I’m cursing myself by saying that. When it comes to finishing games, there’s a phase where you can start to see the end. For me, that was about halfway through 2024. But “seeing the end” is not the same as “really being at the end.” Currently it feels a lot more like “being at the end”, which comes as a relief, even though there’s still work to be done.
So, the last update was 9 months ago… to put that in perspective, that’s almost the time it takes to birth a child. It’s also a little bit under how long Anodyne 1’s development was. I’ve come to realize over the years that there are some key aspects of games that extend the development. Being 3D, requiring heavy setting/story research, requiring tools investment, coming up with new gameplay, having a story, and having lots of things to do. Angeline Era, uh, falls under all of those things. I kind of like doing a lot of those things though, ha ha. Maybe not so much tools dev, but certainly we’ll re-use the autocuber in future games (and I’ve already used my cutscene editor on danchi days)
It’s the sort of thing that could really get out of control, but actually most of development has gone smoothly. Still, we’re looking at a 3.5 year development (sweat) if we release towards the end of this year.
In hindsight, helpers for marketing, art, project management, and tools programming sure would have been nice... but it’s too late! Maybe the game should have had significantly less levels… but it’s also too late!! Ha ha!
Playing the game right now is pretty exciting. You were able to get a taste of the game with the demo we put out last year, but it was relatively bite-sized. It might actually be < 10% of the final game…
When I play now, I go “Hm, this probably should have been a smaller game", but I also go “Well, probably only one shot at a big 3D bumpslash game, so we might as well…”
To be honest, part of my motivation is a more childish one, I simply thought it would be nice to have a game that could have a nice, big world map illustration done for it, accurate to the layout of the game. One in which every level has some kind of memorable vignette or aspect to it that you could convey on a drawn map, a very tiny story, or a comic-like illustration. I’ve had this illustration of Link’s Awakening’s world as my wallpaper for a while…
There’s really a unique, wild sense of adventure to the Angeline Era. And quite a lot of drama with the story arcs and characters, even if the balance of this game has more focus on the adventure/action, I think we managed to find a satisfying balance for a genre where it’s traditionally a bit tricky to fit story in.
The game overall… I think it really represents the fun and excitement of getting out there into the real world and meeting people and places and not knowing what to expect. The whimsy and humor of everyday life… the lightness and playfulness it can have, even with acute moments of darkness. It’s quite a journey, and if you’re fans of our games already then I think by the end you will be screaming…
Well, I want this game to be out as much as you do, but for me it’s health first! Did you know I wake up around 5 AM in the summer? Yes, I’m an “Old Man” - I love Bed. It’s almost 9 PM as I type this sentence, and I’m getting sleepy.
What Happened Since September 2024?
While the main chunk of my work has been Angeline Era, I’ve been hopping back and forth between my other game Danchi Days. I was working more focused on Danchi Days in past months getting its (now-released!) demo ready, but now I’ll be something like 30/70 DD/AE until AE’s out, since I want to keep DD at a steady pace as we hope to release DD next year.
Anyways, here’s the AE progress report..
Story
Last year Marina finished the final draft of the main story. I looked over it and had some suggestions to additional scenes or points that could be strengthened with some characters. Last month Marina revised some scenes and added some additional writing here and there. This process was something of a “Lore / Extra NPC Pass”, in that we went over the game’s levels and thought about how to arrange or tie them together to best speak to some of the story’s themes and worldbuilding. This was a nice process that will really help pull together and connect various characters and narrative aspects throughout the game.
Cutscenes
With the main script done, I was able to import it to a big spreadsheet. I based this spreadsheet off of the format I used for Danchi Days, making it easy for writers and localizers to edit in-place, and with a one-click “Download to Unity” thingy I made. Danchi Days is really text-heavy, and working on that helped me figure out ways to smooth out the process of getting text into the game. I really like the format I have things now: it’s easy to keep things localized, searchable, shareable online, and easy to download into the game and double-check changes with version control.
With the script imported, I’ve been able to work towards having the game “sequence-complete”, which is the process of making all the text play in the proper place with all the needed gameplay connections (e.g. text before a boss fight, changing levels after a cutscene). However, on this pass I’m not bothering with characters being on screen or positioned, or art for the cutscene. In other words, the bulk of my remaining work is finishing all of these cutscene stubs, making sure the game works from start to finish, and eventually fixing everything up once we have remaining level/character art.
It’s really helpful to do the “sequence-complete” stuff as a separate pass, because there’s just a lot of miscellaneous stuff that becomes concrete when stubbing out scenes. Level transitions, required music, how certain areas connect. Also, it makes what was before a very disconnected game into something resembling the connected, final form, which is satisfying.
Overworld
Related to continuity is finishing the overworld. After finishing the levels last year, I did the overworld designs. This year I made occasional revisions as we did the Lore / NPC Pass on the story. The overworlds are looking pretty final now (in terms of their design)… they just need art and potentially last design revisions during that process.
Having the overworlds (with the ability to properly enter/exit every level) is really nice, since actually I can play the game as a game. Of course, every level has one of those “Search Minigames”, I made a bunch of those. Having the overworld done was nice as this helped with Marina and I writing the Area Descriptions / names for each level, as well as thinking about how they fit into the overall lore, and being able to make some extra overworld revisions to make the positions of each level (and the way to reach them) have more intention to them.
Level Art Pass
Ah, now the levels. So, the level design was basically done last fall, except for some special levels which I’ve worked on here and there. Marina finalized art direction and style stuff last winter/this spring, and did most of the game’s basic art pass for the levels. Before her base art pass, I went through and tightened up some of the levels, although generally they were pretty good already (given that the work I did on levels in 2024 was to a large extent revisions and polish on rougher 2023 levels). The changes on the whole were fairly minor, I think the biggest leap in quality was in 2024 using my knowledge from the response to the 2024 demo.
For this art pass, Marina first developed most of the needed 3D models for the areas (the rocks, grass, other props), which sped up the time for doing the base art pass considerably. By doing like a bunch of levels’ worth of base art passes we also came up with some additional tweaks and additions to the Autocuber level art tool to make this process even faster.
Above is an example of a “Base Art Pass”. The location of the level in the world, its lore/story aspects, are decided at this point. Marina goes through and does the art for the level, fixing some camera or visual issues with the base design if necessary. The base art pass leaves some stuff out for later, in particular polish with the ground, or “props” like trees, weeds, flowers, etc. But this gets it to a relatively good state if we end up having to rush some things.
One reason for the base art pass is it allows us to do longer playtests. There’s usually not much game design difference between a base art pass and final art pass level, so it’s OK to have people test levels before they are looking all nice and pretty. Here’s a nice little town screenshot from the game, as a treat.
Bosses
Last fall I finished all of the remaining boss coding (minus art/sfx implementation). I found a good process for setting up their coding that made them relatively fast to make. There’s a lot of bosses in this game! They’re all really unique and fun to fight, so we hope you’ll enjoy them. I won’t say much more… they’re best experienced in-game. But between the design, visuals, sounds, music, and relevance to the world and story, they should all be memorable emotional high points to the game!.
Entity (Character, Enemy, Boss) Art
Marina is working on designs for various NPCs that can be reused throughout the game, as well as figuring out an efficient process for texturing that looks “Just detailed enough” without requiring extra effort.
See how the shirt is textured but the other clothes are mostly flat.
Marina has also been finishing up enemy and boss art. This required some visual design for the enemies (they’re all really good! I won’t spoil…) and bosses. On my end hooking the art up to the placeholder art enemies/bosses has been pretty straightforward. Having this art is great and also necessary for testing because of the visual communication that the enemy art contain.
This leads me to..
Sound and Music
With more visuals I can also now do more sounds. I’m putting more care into this than previous games, as I want enemies and bosses to unique, aural feels to them. However… I am pretty aware of the diminishing returns point with sounds where the majority of people will feel the game has a unique sound palette, so I probably won’t spend lots and lots of time here.
With the levels’ base art done I’ve been able to choose songs (and write new ones as necessary) to place in the levels. It was fun to do this and make sure the songs were distributed pretty evenly across the game. A good chunk of my time the past months were finishing up a lot of music I merely started earlier in development, or hadn’t gotten around to making. This was… is… a lot of music haha. I’m happy with how it’s all come out, though there’s still about a dozen to go. However, most of these are on the simpler side: < 60s themes for events, remixes of existing themes. There’s still a few tricky ones, though… (mainly the action levels).
Overall I’m pleased with how the OST came out. With the game’s music I wanted to have some unifying principles to the score, so I set out to develop some recurring instruments, and general categories for my instrumentation that I could rely on when doing the synth design for my songs when I wanted stuff to sound more “Futurey” or more “Fae-ish” or more “Human-like”. These don’t really end up being applied or used super strictly, but they did lead to a more curated sound palette, so it means the OST might have a bit more of an aesthetic unity to it, which I’m happy about.
I actually just recently finished all the boss themes, which was sometimes smooth, sometimes an ordeal. Yes, nearly all the bosses have unique songs! I think it’s a really nice thing to have been able to do. Here’s a tiny excerpt from one with a “dentist drill” synth I made. The boss themes are very cool: like all the music in the game, they’re all very “Angeline Era”, very “Melos”, whether it’s a happy outdoors song or a nightmarish dark boss song…
Other
In between all of that, there’s even more that was done! These are a lot less noticeable overall, but of course very important to the whole game. Stuff like… what items shops carry, the pricing. A little ‘home’ zone you return to through a Certain Method to level up or do other things. Infrastructure for translating the game into different languages (which we did for the demo update this February). Adding character portraits to cutscenes, adding additional features to weapons, fixing and updating some of the artifact items, fleshing out missing features in the cutscene editor, reducing the time it takes for the “you cleared a room” animation by 0.2 seconds.
So what’s left?
Making game sequence-complete with cutscene stubs
Final cutscenes with required missing animations/etc
At least some time for some polish/extra one-offs here and there
About a dozen songs and a bunch of SFX
Placing the various NPCs
Finishing the level descriptions
Finishing some base art passes
Finishing all the final art passes
Finishing some enemy, npc and boss art
Tightening up the UI
Testing
In Conclusion…
Well, thanks for reading and sticking with us through just over 3 years of development now. Not much longer to go until the dawn of the… ~Angeline Era~…
