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Memody: Sindrel Song Testing - v0.12 BETA (EDIT: v0.13 BETA)

5 years ago1,840 words

Here's another update, which addresses the biggest remaining issue - rewarding the player's performance - in the form of 30 clothing items, and the shrine where you can acquire or equip them. The game is likely in its final form now; I still need to fix a few bugs, but I've now finally finished all the major content!

I've spent the last three days or so working from soon after I wake up to soon before I sleep, with only short breaks for eating etc. I'm probably pushing myself way too much to add features that don't matter to a game that might be a complete flop, wasting my time maybe, but I've come this far and there's motivation to make these improvements, so that's what I've been doing.

It's amazing actually that I still have this kind of motivation to work on something I started almost six months ago (sigh!), but I think it's because release is so close and there's a pressure to use the last chance I have to make final tweaks before exposing it to the judgement of potentially many strangers.



As I mentioned in updates to the previous post, the shrine is a new addition where you can equip clothes. It talks, and originally I was going to give it a distinct personality and have it serve as a tutorial as well, instead of the tips pages - I thought it'd be interesting for it to be a combination of a pious priest and a smarmy salesman which commonly broke the fourth wall - but that'd likely be too much of a change, so I won't fix what's not broken. Adding the outfit functionality did seem important though, as now it gives something to aim for. I've tested a bit myself today to see if everything works as it should, and already I found myself caring way more about levels and getting 200% because it'd mean I had something to actually unlock. It's not ideal because there isn't a steady supply of easy rewards right at the start to get people hooked, but it's better than it was before.

There are 30 clothing items, about 20 of which I added in the past two days. Phew! I wish I'd had that intense focus for the whole development; it might have been done in a month or two, then! Six of the items are things that were already included before (skirt, shirt, scarf, etc) and the others are mostly sets of a top and pants, which count as two separate items, so it's not as if there are 30 full outfits. But there are more than enough, so I'm quite happy with it.

Some of the items are fairly boring alternate clothes which might not be interesting enough and which I might redo. These were added because I felt I needed something that wasn't especially significant for the early level up rewards. More interestingly, you can also unlock a top and pants of each wintrel's outfit for getting 200% on their song, so you can dress like them. There are also three outfits that are references to my old games, which only a handful of people would even recognise or care about, probably, but it seemed a more interesting thing to do than all new things that'd have zero chance of being recognised. Plus it felt significant to me, giving previous efforts a new purpose like this.

The shrine is unlocked on the morning of the third day (Duhrge's day); you have to speak to Hearth (Duhrge's node doesn't unlock until you do), who offers to fly you there; it gets its own world map node. It feels as if there should really be more talking about it than there is, but, well, there isn't! The characters also don't comment if you're dressed like them, even though they should; that's something I'd add if I found the time later, but releasing it is more important.

While making the Memody versions of the other wintrels' outfits, I was content with most of them - they're not the BEST outfit designs in the world, but they're okay, they work - except for Vivace's. So I took this opportunity to make some fairly major changes.



As a character, she's changed quite a bit already through development. She used to be called Melody, and when I designed her outfit I felt a bit lost and just used whatever bland thing came to mind; it always bothered me that it didn't have much in the way of meaning to it, and as her character developed, I felt it suited her less and less. The same was true of her background 'ambient' music, which I also changed very recently.



I'd consider the one on the left here to be Melody, the old character, while the one on the right is Vivace, the one she evolved into. I've spent so long with the original one that it can't not feel wrong to replace it, but I do think that the new one makes more sense.

The old one feels to me like some kind of gentle, friendly, chaste Christian substitute teacher for some reason; a young woman who'd be really nice but not exactly lively. It covers more skin than most of the other outfits! It fit more when her theme was just being musical; I could imagine a children's music teacher with that vibe about her.

Since she's now supposed to be about life, and liveliness, I felt something more summery, open, and loud would be more appropriate. The look I've ended up with makes me think of a forest sprite, sprightly and fey, or someone like Peter Pan, that kind of archetype. She's based around plants, which I think represent Life as an 'element' quite well; I wonder whether I should edit some of her dialogue so that she uses words like 'nature' often, much as Remedy uses 'love' and 'heart'. I like that her head feathers look like leaves, her pants look like the ground/soil, her head is like a flower growing out of a bush, together with the other two flowers which are literally life growing out of her outfit.

Previously she was yellow because it represented life and light, contrasting with Duhrge's purple representing death and dark, and it does feel like a bit of a loss to no longer have that, but I like the idea that Memody has both purple and yellow as her colours instead of someone less important to the story. Duhrge is still sort of purple, but I'd say he's more 'dark coloured' than 'purple coloured'; indigo rather than violet. Plus green obviously adds to the life/vegetation/nature thing (even though plants aren't green in the sindrels' world, the colour obviously has those connotations for us humans).

So yes, that's a bit of a random last-minute change.



I've uploaded v0.12 BETA to Kartridge, so you can have a look at the new additions yourself if you're one of the testers. Hopefully everything works; I've tested it from the beginning to Vivace's stage myself and it seems fine? I'll test again over the coming days.

(I seem to have skipped v0.11 BETA.)

There are a couple of comments on the previous post I've yet to reply to because I've been spending essentially all my time and energy working on this; I'll get to those soon.

I've added some names to the in-game credits, but there are only five so far and I'm sure there were more testers than that (apparently 19 people used access codes... hmm). So if you tested and I've not included your name yet, let me know!

I've also approved some people for testing but don't remember ever hearing any feedback from them. This always seems to happen...

I don't know whether I'll be able to achieve this, but I'm aiming to release the game by the end of next week, which is the end of the month; that seems like a nice date to aim for. It will have been 6 months! 6! Special number!

So if you could get feedback to me by then, I'd appreciate it, especially if there's something that needs fixing, which takes time and further testing.

Six months... I've no idea how long other solo indie games take, or how long my own old games took actually (all I remember is that MARDEK 3 took like three years), though a large chunk of this time was spent very weakened by having brain surgery and radiotherapy. It's only in the past few weeks I've started having anything like a decent amount of energy again (and even then it's fairly low). It would have been quicker if not for all that. Plus there's a huge amount of uncertainty and fear getting back into this games development thing after a long absence, releasing on unfamiliar platforms in a less casual way than when I did years ago, which has surely been causing me to avoid getting to the point where I have to finally be done with this. I've said all that before.

Anyway, we're here now, at the end. I'll spend the next few days doing promotional stuff like setting up new screenshots and a trailer, setting up a proper page for the game on Kartridge, things like that. I have some other similar things to sort out as well. It shouldn't take too long, though I'll be fighting through my mental illness (avoidance) a lot during the process, so it's likely to be quite an anxious upcoming week for me. I'll likely have to face a few things I really rather wouldn't. I've already been missing sleep because I wake up from nightmares where people have played this thing and hated it, or where I release it to a 'meh' response and don't even earn four figures. I've really enjoyed making this thing; it's just social judgement and what this will mean for my future which are, well, less enjoyable.

Thanks to those of you who've stuck around during this tediously drawn-out process!!



...I just looked back at ∞ the first post about Sindrel Song ∞, where I'd been working on it for nine days and already had a gameplay video. I said about it, in that post, from the 5th of January, that Sindrel Song, the new game that I'd just started, "is very near to completion already". Ah, funny.

It's interesting though comparing this screenshot from that post:



To the one from this post:



And yet it's fundamentally the same thing, so that's interesting?

UPDATE: v0.13 BETA

This is a fairly minor update that mainly fixes a progress-stopping bug with Course's dialogue. Also included is keyboard functionality for dialogue, difficulty selection, and the tips pages (you can also go backwards on those now), and you can also more clearly navigate the Lore thing using mouse buttons (both of those things were requested by multiple people).