So it may be a tad late for a January update, but I think we’re still in acceptable range!
Adventures of Chris is coming along. Progress on the Japan level continues, along with backgrounds for the final two levels. MAGFest in Washington, DC was awesome – we watched a lot of people play the game, and made a number of changes in response to the feedback! We’re curious to hear what you think of the new stuff, so read on and give us your opinions!
Japan
We now have the interior designed for Keito Dama Castle and populated with all kinds of ninja cats from the Clan of the Black Yarnball! Check it out:
The ninja cats should feel pretty fierce – this is still pretty preliminary, of course, so difficulty is still being tuned, but I think there’s some promising stuff here. The darkness in the secret passages of the castle is a new feature – I’m not typically a fan of darkness mechanics in other games, but I think with Chris’s ability to shoot fireballs or glowing ice crystals to illuminate his path, Chris should feel significantly less lost than other platforming heroes. Getting the darkness to look good in Unity was a little bit of a challenge – fortunately I think the end result looks pretty good!
MAGFest
MAGFest Indie Videogame Showcase was a wonderful experience – met a lot of great people, got a lot of great feedback on the game, and generally had a good time all around!
I was honestly a little surprised at how many people named “Chris” wanted their picture taken with the banner!
Watching people play the game was very instructive – a number of people played a considerable amount of time and went through several levels (a couple people even came close to 100%-ing the demo!), so we got a lot of useful data. We smoothed out a number of sections that seemed to be more challenging than intended and fixed a number of bugs. We also significantly tightened up the dialog in Story Mode – I don’t want to shortchange the narrative, but I also want to get people to the world map as soon as possible!
The most significant change (you may have noticed this from the above GIF, if you’ve played the game before) is that we gave Chris a “ceiling walk” animation:
I thought Kyle’s animation here was pretty hysterical myself, but the main goal was to give Chris a very obviously different “state” for when he’s on the ceiling versus just in the air. This is because the Jump button has two different functions depending on that state – jump when on the ceiling, deflate when in the air. My hope is that, by making Chris’s “state” very clearly distinct, it will make Chris’s “reverse gravity” platforming more intuitive in general. What do you think?
Another concern has been making sure that all primary gameplay elements are clear without requiring players to read text – sometimes important information gets skimmed over or skipped if it’s buried in dialog. We’re working on adding some help icons to make it clear that you can always float out of any given level to return to the world map – hopefully in an unobtrusive, temporary sort of way!. We’re also trying to think about ways to encourage folks to visit Mexico first (I really don’t want to restrict players anymore that I have to – I love having freedom, even if it’s freedom to go somewhere that may be too challenging!). Suggestions are, of course, welcome!
Links
In case you haven’t seen it yet, we setup our “Coming Soon” page on Steam! So now you can head over and wishlist or follow us: (https://store.steampowered.com/app/341170)
We also setup a Facebook page a while ago, so if you prefer to get your updates that way, that option is now available: (https://www.facebook.com/AdventuresOfChris)
You can check out our animated reveal trailer here:
