Welcome to our third Dev Log Jungle Nation! Were stoked to have you here for our first update of 2022, so let's jump in. Its an exciting time for the team, with new character redesigns, UI reworks taking shape, as well as the playtesting of new mechanics! We are also approaching the point where all the different pieces of the game are integrating with each other. Its so fun and fulfilling to see these combined ideas materialize into a real game! Were also excited to announce that a major update might come in the Closed Beta, more information below.

Art:

Our artist has been creating brand new character redesigns, coloring styles/palettes, and animations. Here's a new look into some of the coloring decisions that were finalized that we thought would be cool to show you!

Hot Take: You might get flashbacks to the Halftone Patterns from a previous Dev Log! We are also exploring icon designs for different characters. These icons will help us tremendously in making concise, clean, and intuitive presentations, especially when we have to show a lot of game information in a limited space.

Game Design:

Were playtesting new mechanics and features that we want to add to the game. We threw out a few ideas that didn't seem to fit, and we are testing extensively and hammering down the most promising ones. We're not going to talk about the details just yet as we don't want to make any promises, but just so you know, we are looking into new roles, new powers, new voting mechanisms, etc. There is a chance that these new mechanics/features won't make it in the major update, BUT, you'll see them in the subsequent updates that we will push out after. We want RoJ to be a live and evolving game, so were counting on our community to keep giving us their valuable feedback to take the game to new heights!

UI/UX Rework:

We are revamping our Host UI (what you see on the shared screen of the game), to make the overall RoJ experience better for both the host, and players. To give each character more personality, we decided to revisit the player cards for each Bite House member, and make them more thematic by making it look like a video call to President Puma. Its important for us to create a visual language that conveys game information to all players quickly and intuitively, so everyone can just focus on having fun with the gameplay.
Another challenge we overcame was about the 8+ players game, and especially the 10 players game, where we had limited space to show all the player cards. The first solution we had was to start the design layout from the highest capacity of players, in this case 10, and work backwards from there. We revisited this idea though because it meant sacrificing the 5, 6, and 7 players UI experience a bit. So, as a result, the solution we went for is to give 8+ players games their own UI, a slightly different layout than the 7- player games, which gives all a better visual experience in game! You can see the 7 player layout below:

Timeline Update:

The final integration of different elements in a game is usually an exciting and unpredictable period. With that in mind, were really happy with our progress so far and we think were on track to launch a version of the redesigned game in Spring 2022!! Were also hoping to release a major update to our Closed Beta, so those of you who are lucky enough to snag a Beta key can get a sneak peek sooner, but this will ultimately depend on how well the integration goes. Previously, we had mentioned that the major update to the Closed Beta will be in Jan/Feb 2022, but we are changing it to TBD. Our focus is to have something concrete for our Spring launch, and pushing an update to the Closed Beta may distract us from that, because it entails an extra round of QA and support. So, in favor of our overall progress, we may delay the major update until we feel confident in the last stages of development. Stay tuned! In any case, were committed to giving an early update to our core community on Discord before releasing it to the broader audience. If you want to follow our development process more closely or have any questions, please feel free to join our Discord! Thats it for Devlog #3 friends, thanks for coming and for being such dedicated jungle citizens! See you next month for #4! GerdooGames

[ 2022-01-31 21:57:55 CET ] [ Original post ]