Hello everyone! We haven't been very active on Steam, and we apologize for that. In order to have a continuous thread of DEV BLOG updates, we have decided to repost the articles originally posted on Kickstarter. The other articles will follow shortly, and we hope you will enjoy reading them! -- this article was originally posted: 04/21/2023 Hello everyone! Once again, this article is directly written by Inateno for simplicity in writing. A closer look at biome 2: an underground and labyrinthine biome in which you will face creatures capable of moving on walls and ceilings. Creatures that will chase you and jump on you! Today, I propose to delve a little into the content offered by this biome, but I still keep a lot of surprises for you. Biome 2 therefore requires a type of enemy that can walk on walls, ceilings, and jump on us. And as you may already suspect, we naturally thought of spiders. Except that many of you are arachnophobic. After realizing this, we changed our plans. Last time, I talked about my inspirations for creating Gold Project. Today, I will explain how and why we decided to remove the visual designs of spiders in the game, and what we replaced them with! PS: throughout this article, I will show spider designs in pixel-art, no real spider images. I hope arachnophobes won't be too scared seeing these images, I apologize in advance if it bothered you. Choosing spiders to meet the need for "monsters that walk on walls and ceilings" was obvious to us, so without thinking much, we started making this kind of design.
For non-arachnophobic individuals, it may seem cool. After some in-game tests, it was quite successful. Being chased by numerous spiders without any environment or music was already oppressive. That's exactly what we wanted... but. But here's the thing, we didn't consider arachnophobia and how many players it affects. After showing our progress to a friend who also works in the gaming industry, he mentioned arachnophobia and the fact that it affects nearly 30% of players! We realized that we would have a problem, and surprisingly, we don't have anyone on the team who is arachnophobic... so we just didn't think about it.

Changing the spider design to something else...

From a Game Design point of view, changing the spiders to "something else" is not a problem as long as the gameplay is respected, so we started discussing it. In a previous article "DEV BLOG #4 - How we create monsters in Gold" I told you that sometimes monsters are created based on a joke. Well, that's exactly what happened with these monsters! After all, in the game's story, the monsters of shadows and gold are humans corrupted by gold to the point where they transform into deformed creatures. So we came up with the idea of making monsters composed of arms and legs, like creepy assemblages. And the drawing result was pretty cool in my opinion!
A first test sheet "spiders for arachnophobes"

A drawing is not pixel art

Drawing on paper and making pixel-art are two different things. If we create concepts as drawings, they may not necessarily work when converted into pixel art.
There are issues with readability, detail, and resolution. And in our specific case with Gold, there is a crucial factor: the monsters are all black with very little red/gold detail. Having a solid-colored body can blur the readability on potato-like shapes. To explain it simply, having a leg that passes in front of the body will be completely invisible with only one color. Here's a diagram to illustrate the explanation.
PS: This is a high-quality diagram made on PAINT.net. There's a reason why I'm not the one doing the pixel art in the game! I think you've got the idea. However, we'll still show you the pixelated version we ended up with.
Finally, we ended up with something completely different, which is not a spider. Here is a new concept sheet to try to find readable monsters. Of course, not all of them are in the game. On this sheet, only 2 monsters have been selected.

The Boss of Biome 2, an exception to the rule

I want to clarify that we still kept a design inspired by a spider for biome 2. Named "the golden widow," we tried to avoid the small triggers that cause arachnophobia as much as possible. After showing this design to several people who agreed to participate in our survey, it turns out that this boss, half-woman, half-spider, is "acceptable."
If this design has bothered you too much, I apologize, don't hesitate to come and discuss it with me either on Discord or on Twitter, we will do our best to adjust the design of this boss if we can get new data. In your opinion, what will be the attacks of this boss?

General game progression, playtesting, and Beta access

Many of you are asking us where we are, when will the Kickstarter rewards be delivered, what is the release date of the game, and when will the beta start. For now, I can tell you that we are on schedule. The arachnophobia topic caused a bit of a delay in December, but we caught up, and overall, things are on track. We want to do the playtest quickly, but I can't promise anything in terms of dates, so you'll have to be patient. The same goes for the beta. We are quite demanding on the version we will give you. A little more patience, but it's worth it! That said, I can detail a bit the difference between beta and playtest:

• playtest = a version with a lot of missing visuals, few sounds and music, placeholders / blockouts, empty or missing maps, an incomplete game.
• beta = a game almost finished, some content is missing but the majority of the sounds and visuals are integrated into the game and the game is playable in most parts.

Regarding the development, we only have left:

• the final mega boss
• the skill tree
• finalize the world map
• and bugs, as you can imagine!

In other words, by the end of May, the technical development of the game will be almost finished! Also, we have had some questions regarding console versions. Know that someone on the team is actively working on porting our engine to the Switch, which will also be useful for the PS4 and PS5 ports. The Xbox port should be the easiest. Again, I cannot guarantee anything at this stage, but we are doing our best to reduce the release time between different platforms! Thank you for taking the time to read this article, I hope it was interesting. I will write a new article for you very soon! In the meantime, don't forget to come to the Discord.

[ 2023-06-17 11:00:03 CET ] [ Original post ]