Progress Updates

Sorry everybody, it's been a little bit since the last update! Fortunately, it's not for lack of progress, but because there's been a lot of progress. Sound effects and the soundtrack are well underway, as well as a whole bunch of smaller changes and updates. We've got:

• Most sound effects for UI and combat in place
• Most of the soundtrack recorded and in place
• The start of the settings page
• A bunch of long-standing bug fixes
• More art of all kinds

Sound Effects

As far as sound effects go, almost everything is now put together. I'm still trying different things in a few spots (especially in combat), but the pieces are all in place. I'm taking a pretty solidly JRPG approach to the UI and combat sounds, so there should be clear and unmistakeable feedback for every move you make, all the beeps and boops and chimes you might hope for. Combat is also aiming for more JRPG-like stylization, where sound effects communicate the idea of the mechanics, rather than the kind of literal diegetic sound of the action being taken.

The sound effects also include a lot of background ambience that plays during story and dialogue scenes to give flavor to the settings. Most of that's put together, though it pulls away from the traditional JRPG style a bit more. I wouldn't call it dour or grimdark, but it's a bit more moody, perhaps. If you've played The Salt Keep, you can probably imagine. We're not doing jaunty pastoral adventure here, you know?

Music

The soundtrack is almost entirely complete as well. I don't want to say too much about this until I get some samples ready to share, but expect lots of minor chord overworld tracks and riff-heavy guitar-focused combat themes. I'm not new to the writing or performing side of it, but I'm completely new to recording and mixing, so it's been a learning experience and I'm still trying to kind of normalize into mixes that work across all the various devices a player might use (headphones, laptop speakers, and more complete speaker setups).

Keep an eye out for previews on this front - they'll be coming soon.

Settings

This may not look like much to most people, but it's exciting to me, so I'll include it: I've also got a working Settings page put together! Not all of these individual settings themselves are working yet (and some may yet change), but it should give a good idea of the plan. 

These are a mix of custom settings unique to this game, default settings Ren'Py uses, and settings pulled from Ren'Py's separate accessibility menu, which are mostly reading-specific, like the opendyslexic font:

I'll probably write something more long-form about how I'm doing the sound in a later post once I'm ready to start posting samples and more certain I'm not going to change things. Until then, thanks for reading!