Hello everyone, happy to have you jump in and read our first devlog!! With PAX out of the way, and development in full swing again, its a good time to show you all our current plans and what we have been working on recently. I hope youre as excited as we are! Art and UI/UX: After multiple meetings and considering different options, we have decided to use a simpler and more uniform color palette as well as a more comic-like art style that we can use in the game. We also decided to use Halftone Patterns in our art designs, which is something we believe to be unique that is rarely seen in games.
We revisited our character design, and we decided to reimplement the characters with animations in mind. Since we decided to animate the characters and have finalized the new style/color palette, our game artist, Naeem, is redesigning the characters around these details.
We are making great progress with the games UI/UX revamp. We started this work from scratch by analyzing the player journey for each type of player, and trying to find out the pain points, and where to improve. The UI/UX design for the host (the shared screen) is consolidated now, and we are hard at work with the implementation work. We are excited to share more with the community in the upcoming weeks as we make more progress (which you can get a first peek at by joining our Discord).
Game Design: We are analyzing some of the pain points RoJs gameplay has, and we are brainstorming ideas on how to fix/improve them. As part of this, we are implementing some experimental features/mechanics, which we are playtesting on a regular basis using experimental builds.
Tech: As part of preparing to do the host UI/UX revamp, we completed the refactor/re-architecture work in our host code. The new architecture will let us add new content to the game in a more stable, and customizable process. Integrating artwork to the game is usually much slower than creating the assets, and we want to minimize this bottleneck. Similarly, our server code is getting a massive upgrade and new architecture. RoJ is a live game designed to be enjoyed in real-time on multiple platforms using multiple devices. Operating and maintaining a live game is no easy feat, even for larger teams. The new architecture will let us add new features, track performance and reliability, and most importantly, scale faster. We want to be prepared when we see new waves of players on the horizon marching towards the gates of Republic of Jungle. Community: We successfully held our first RoJ Gaming Night event on Thursday, October 28th. Our community streamers, and some of our community members got together to play the game with the devs and celebrate the successful Kickstarter campaign. We will be running more RoJ Gaming Night events in the future, we are aiming to hold one once a month!
We also introduced Infernozilla, the community management team who will be taking care of RoJs community in the same event. We are excited to be working with them!
Last but not least, we sent out the backer surveys to our Kickstarter backers, and fulfilled 2 of the initial Kickstarter rewards: Beta Keys and Discord Roles. Thanks for reading our Devlog! Stay tuned for more very soon! GerdooGames