Hey Kinoko fans!

This month’s update is going to be a short one. Since it’s the middle of summer, and since we’ve been in and out of heatwaves for the last few weeks here in England, Chel and I have both been taking the opportunity to go a little slower than usual throughout July. We’ve still been able to get a decent amount of work done between the two of us, but more importantly, we’ve taken some time to ourselves, and hopefully staved off some of the burnout that comes with working too much for too long!

In our personal lives, we were delighted to share our tenth anniversary as a couple earlier this month! We celebrated this by taking a short holiday. Even though we didn’t travel far, it was still extremely hot in our neighbouring Wales. Nevertheless we managed to do everything we wanted to do, and got a little break away from our usual four walls. Since we live in the city, it was really nice just to see something different for a change. It was our first holiday in several years, so I think we both really benefited from it.

Chel’s opted to take a nice long break right through to September, in order to work on some of her passion projects like Bovine Excision, but she did me the favour beforehand of designing all the remaining starsprite abilities required for our next demo. That’s left me with loads to do as I ‘hold the fort’ over the next month. I did take a two week break myself in July, on and around our holiday, but I’m back to work again now, and focused on implementing some more of these abilities.

The ability that I’m currently working on is one called Star Step. Unlike all the other abilities we’ve showcased before, this one is not intended to be used in combat at all. Instead, it allows Kinoko to command a yellow starsprite to place a platform of solidified light nearby. Kinoko can then jump on this and use it to reach otherwise inaccessible platforms and ascend to greater heights. This has involved implementing a kind of ‘ability cursor’, enabling the player to manually target where they want an ability to be cast, but besides that it’s really rather simple. Just place a platform, then use it before it expires!

And even if Chel herself is taking a lengthy break from Star Heretic, she’s still working behind-the-scenes with our contractors like AtroxChobatsu, overseeing the production of creative assets like animation, music and sound effects for the game. Over the past few months we’ve made some really nice progress in the area of animations for Star Heretic. Now, we have something for all of our planned demo enemies, even if they’re not all completely polished up yet. Environment art, as you might have seen in some of our previous blog posts, is also coming along nicely. The main thing that’s left for us to focus on now is actual gameplay.

One of the most recent updates in this area is the rough animations for the fangflower enemy, which camouflages itself in the forests of Fungaia to prey on unsuspecting wildlife – sometimes even kuparkukes! AtroxChobatsu delivered this one to us earlier today, so I’m very excited to see what it looks like cleaned up and coloured when Chel resumes working on Star Heretic properly in September. I’ve had a look at them all myself, and I have to say, the whole set of rough animations looks great!

Anyway, like I said in the beginning, it’s just a short update from us this month, given our breaks! Even though I’m pretty much holding the fort in terms of the game’s development in August, I have lots planned as always, especially now that I finally have a complete set of starsprite ability concepts to work with, and a complete set of enemies animated and ready to implement. As always, and all being well, you can look forward to the usual update from me in a month! 😁

Until next time!