New Year Dev Updates, Shops, Upgrades, Churches & Libraries!
Development Updates
We hope you had a great holiday season and are off to a great new year’s start!
We made big strides during 2018 to get a good portion of the game into top shape, and that means a lot more of the way towards the finish line is behind us. While we have to keep some of our victories under wraps for now, we've been able to share quite a few milestone achievements with you over the updates. Later in the year we aim to give you a more concrete release timeline. We are really grateful for your patience and for your support during development, and are excited for the time we can share the fruits of our labor with you. Till then, we’ll continue giving you progress updates as we move forward, as well as host our biweekly development livestreams.
Work these past months has been concentrated on all fronts of development. On the graphical side, Deryk and I have continued hammering away at all the missing pixel art assets for these and other later areas of the game. This, at times, can be an arduous process considering the sheer volume of work. Yet, the diversity of locations which range from abandoned culverts to beautiful cathedrals, has made these past few months especially engaging to develop.
Recently, we finished putting together Blivek’s Church, inside which there is a library with close to 100 titles. These writings don't just add life and variety to the world, but they also provide valuable hints as to the location of four shrines spread out across each corner of these lands.
You’ll be able to briefly glimpse into each one of those books, and further purchase over 20 of them to read them in full in the Literature tab of your Journal Screen. There’s a myriad of details and backstories in HFA’s universe that are not part of the central narrative for pacing purposes, but are available as in-universe accounts of events and narratives for all those inquisitive players to piece together.
Messledin’s Traveling Shop
Early in your exploratory career you'll meet a traveling salesman named Messledin, from whom you can buy all kinds of upgrades and tweaks. Originally a small villain-turned-ally, this character has undergone an interesting transformation during development. Early on he was cut out to make way for another character. As time went by, however, this other character also underwent a transformation of his own, and so the once grumpy and rigid Messledin made his comeback—now with a more mercantile personality, and a cute and bubbly nature.
Among all the items and trinkets he has up for sale are several permanent buff items like Bloodstones and Wisestones to increase your HP and SP, which you'll remember from the All-backer demo. Messledin also sells several special accessories with mechanical tweaks like faster running speed, greater attack speed, enhanced experience rates, etc. Furthermore, being an avid cartographer, Messledin has tailor-made maps of almost all areas ready for purchase, provided you have visited them at least once.
He also has several map screen upgrades for sale, which will make tracking things a lot easier. These include automatic markers for chest, permanent buff items and spells. You can purchase a first and secondsetofmarkers for more specific exploration, leveling or strategic needs.
In addition to the above, we’ve been working on tweaking a couple of Alicia’s later spells to make them more flexible for certain puzzle scenarios we plan to implement. We’ll have more to share on that in the next update.
Work has also been concentrated on the game's sound design, implementing a good amount of sound effects we've been keeping on our to-do list. One good example is the sound of Alicia's footsteps, which now differ based on the texture of the terrain she's running on. It's surprising how much of a difference small details like this make in terms of immersion, and how much effort it takes to get them right.
Lastly, a lot of back-end and coding efforts have gone into optimizing the runtime as well as upgrading our level and puzzle implementation mechanisms. This includes things like making families out of switches or buttons, which can be arranged to be triggered in a specific order to open doors and reveal chests, among other goodies. The dialog/scripting system also received some upgrades and optimizations, making it more straightforward to set up elaborate cutscene instructions for NPCs
We hope to bring you even more cool developments in the coming updates. Till then, let us remind you of the development livestreams we run every other Tuesday at 1pm CT over at https://www.twitch.tv/heartforthalicia.
If you haven't dropped by yet, we welcome you to hang out with us and the friendly community. And if you cannot make it for any reason, you can still watch the archived livestreams over here.
