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Hi! At the moment, I’m working with a QA company to find and fix bugs, and I’m also working on optimizing the game’s framerate. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve improved and implemented a couple of features. First, the interaction wheel has been updated. A few weeks back I asked you guys which UI scheme worked best out of these four:  A,B and D were tied, with many saying the colors were good for accessibility reasons, and the colors in option C were possibly the easiest to read and most aesthetically pleasing. At the same time, many people in the feedback for demo asked for mouse support to be added to the game, as controlling through the keyboard turned out to be clunky. So I decided to combine all the options above! The game can now played with keyboard+mouse, and the base color options are those of category C, while highlighting an option with the mouse turns them into a variant of option D. Aesthetics, accessibility and comfortable controls all in one! :) Here’s a preview:  A quest tracker has also been added to the game, so that players can keep a track of the objectives. The tracker, of course, updates dynamically and keeps up with the tasks you’ve completed and gives a notification for newly added ones as well:  What do you think? The next few days (or the rest of December) will be spent on fixing bugs and optimizing the game. If all goes well, ideally, January will be spent on marketing, making the trailer and preparing for release! -Armaan
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Hi! Having completed the previous tasks of polishing the game and implementing visual improvements, I’ve now started with one of the most important tasks - identifying and fixing bugs! To be honest, chasing issues is tiring, difficult work (more than I’d expected!) but it’s good to see long pending issues finally resolved! :) Slowly the game is beginning to reach the stage where it can be released to the public (which is a very scary thought lol) I’m midway through the last round of playing through and fixing the bugs by myself, after which I’ll send over the complete game to a QA company for thorough testing.  In between this there are still a couple of things I still need to implement - a simple quest tracker, improved controller support, better saving/ loading, a few dialogue fixes and some other smaller tasks.
If all goes to plan (as it has, thankfully, until now) this should all be done by mid December. After that, I’ll focus on improving the performance and framerate of the game. That’s it for this time! Armaan Hi! For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on improving the visuals of the game. Which, as you can see in the video of the market street, meant redrawing a lot of artwork! Buildings, trees and other parts of the background have been redrawn and improved. Since then, I’ve also improved and redrawn some of the character outfits (not seen in the video though) Apart from that, I’ve gone through the whole game and added the soundtrack at the right moments and places and added ambient/ environmental sounds wherever required. Also, I’ve proofread the dialogues, and will be doing that again with some assistance during the coming days. As of right now, I’m implementing variations of color and artwork for different times of the day and weather conditions (clear, rainy, morning, noon, evening etc) This should be done within a day, after which I’ll return to adding cutscenes to important points of the game.  At that point, apart from some minor tasks, the game will be done! Then the rest of December will be used for identifying and fixing bugs, and optimizing performance. That’ll be a hugely important task, so I hope to get to it asap! By the end of December, I’ll probably be able to announce a release date as well :)
Thanks for reading and following along! -Armaan Hi! And finally, all pending tasks and missing parts have been completed! Now it’s on to bringing it all together, testing and improving everything as required. First, I’ll be playing through the full game to assess and test if everything’s working as it should, and if anything feels lacking and needs more work. At the same time I’ll start planning out the sound and music design. I’ll also assess what moments need sprucing up with cutscenes like this one:  Then the rest of November will be spent optimizing and polishing the game’s visuals. See you next time! Armaan Hi! These past few weeks I’ve spent most of my time creating the diary system and adding notes for it, but the most exciting news are the new speech bubbles!  The biggest complaint with the demo was that at times it was hard to tell who was the speaker of which dialogue, as the old speech bubbles were just boxes on top of multiple characters’ heads. I always wanted to add comic style speech bubbles with arrows pointing to the speakers heads, but I wasn’t sure how to make that work dynamically. The solution was surprisingly simple and only took me a few minutes to implement. All I had to do was make an arrow shaped sprite show up right above the speaking character’s head, disconnected from the dialog box itself. This allows the arrow to follow the character to the edge of the screen while the dialog box remains static - giving it that dynamic look I wanted!  Also updated, the conversation options box’s design. What do you think? Would a more solid, black box with red/ blue color text (like in the speech bubbles) work better? I've also been testing different color combinations for the interaction wheel UI. After a lot of testing and asking for opinions, I've settled on C. What do you think?  Lastly, the diary system. This has probably been one of the most time consuming features of all, but it’s hard to imagine a Detective game without a notepad, right? As a result, this feature has been reduced in scope and is a very simplistic record of the Detective’s observations (rather than a multi-tabbed compendium as planned earlier)  I think it does the job all the same! It’s still a work in progress, and there are some issues to be sorted out still. It’ll also contain the map, which I don’t want to reveal yet :) Another cool feature: A lockpicking minigame!  A couple more UI and diary improvements to come during the rest of the month, and a bit of work on polishing the dialogues.
See you next time! Armaan Hi! These updates have become slightly less frequent, but that’s mostly because development work has me completely absorbed + there’s been a lot of non - show-able work done over the past month. Here’s a shot of one of the new areas from Pineview:  And here’s a wip preview of the diary.  I’m still figuring out the best way to make this feature work!
New NPCs have also been added to populate the new (and old) areas. Some of them will be fully fleshed out characters like the ones in the demo, while others will just speak their thoughts when you walk past them (as seen in the screenshot above) This is something I love from the Witcher games and decided to implement here :) I’ll spend the coming week working on the diary and the rest of the UI. Then it’s a bit more work on fleshing out the town, the npcs and making sure the game is complete - all to be done during October. Then I’ll get on to the polishing phase, adding music and more cinematic transitions and cutscenes! -Armaan Hello! Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve managed to finish up the remaining dialogues and scenes, and the core of the game is now essentially complete! As promised in the last devlog, I’ve since begun work on adding new areas to the town named Pineview. Here’s a glimpse of one of those new areas: Aspen Street!  These areas will also be populated with NPCs to talk to, and will have observable objects that add to the lore, history and myths of Pineview. Another couple of days and the new areas will be finished, after which I’ll begin connecting them to the rest of the game. After that, I’ll work on adding the diary/ journal mechanic and improving the UI! See you next time! -Armaan Hi! Been a LONG time since the last devlog, hasn’t it? After the Indiegogo campaign ended, it took me a while to reorient myself and get back to my old daily schedule of actually developing the game. As mentioned earlier, I shall be moving in with my friends. This is actually great, as the work of game dev can often get lonely and a little maddening when working all alone - so being around should help keep my spirits up as we head into the final months of development! Expect pictures of the new work space! (if it ends up looking good, that is  This isn’t my new bedroom. I don’t live in the 90s. But the game’s characters sure do! Recognize anything? :) During the past weeks, after wrapping up campaign related work, I dived head first into finishing up the remaining scenes so as to bring the core of the game to a 100% completion state. I’ve been able to keep a good pace, and the 100% should be achieved in the next 4-5 days! Then it’s on to the new, exciting parts!  Here’s the updated sprite for fan favorite “Grandpa”!
Exciting parts include - Adding the diary mechanic, improving speech bubbles/ UI (woo!), expanding the town hub “open world” and filling it with life/ NPCs/ dialogs/ things to see, connecting the hub with all the existing scenes so that the player can play through it accordingly. I hope to have this done between Sept-Oct. (Huge trouble if I don’t, so wish me luck!) That’s a lot of extremely important work, after which I shall get on to polishing, adding/ improving cutscenes, weather effects, and trying to bring everything together in a cinematic manner so the whole experience “flows” cohesively. That’s it for this update. Just a few more months to go. Just a little more (hah) work to do! Thanks for coming along on this journey <3 -Armaan  Hey everyone! Exciting news - physical rewards tiers are now available for the Indiegogo campaign! These include stickers, posters, mugs and T-shirts! Check out the campaign here: https://igg.me/at/rainswept/x/19050938 Want to have a chance at getting these for free? Check out this giveaway contest! https://www.destructoid.com/contest-get-swept-up-in-this-rainswept-prize-pack-515994.phtml Hi everyone! I’m really excited to announce that the Indiegogo campaign for Rainswept is now live! Please consider supporting the game by following this link: https://igg.me/at/rainswept/x/19050938 Also, here’s the new trailer: What do you think? Let me know!
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AuthorHi, I'm Armaan, the creator of Rainswept and Forgotten Fields. On this blog, I post weekly updates about my games' development (or as often as possible!) Archives
March 2021
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