Looking good eh

So close. It’s been a while since I’ve updated the diary, and a LOT has happened.

                                  We have Music!!                        We have Art!!

Those things are kinda important, right? Right.
Well, what happened was that we were kinda unhappy with our art, since it was pretty rustic and basic at best. I had botched some really high poly models together in Blender that would make a pro cringe (it did). The music was unconvincing and the SFX consisted of whatever we found for free on the Internet. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good either.
I put together a trailer that was basically an Alpha trailer, and we showed it around. Just when we had lost hope, we found a musician/composer from Romania who was willing to make us custom music for next to nothing. We also managed to hook up with an awesome art team that agreed to partner with us on the project and replace ALL the art. 2D, 3D, character, the works.
We thought we were at Beta, but it turns out it was Alpha. Oh well.
I suddenly found that I had an art TEAM! Someone who could put my mental visualizations into real art. The first thing was to change the ‘cells’, which were basically boxes with grooves for the running track.
We decided to make the new ‘cells’ more organic and uneven, and rather than a simple cube floating in water as we had done before, make them floating islands.

                                  OLD CELL                                                               NEW CELL

Some more updates:

• We decided to release with twenty-one levels, seven down from the earlier plan of twenty-eight.
• There’s a (kind of) interactive story now, the animals are the narrators of the story in an unconventional sense.
• At some point, the realization dawned upon us that we had a game that was not for the 12-20 year old gamer market that we had thought it was for. The game was far too complex to target towards that particular audience, but the art style (very friendly, bright, cartoony) was pointed to them. this needed to change.

To this end, we decided on a low-poly look for the environments and a sober, stylized look for the UI. Drawing inspiration from native art, we redesigned all the 2D art of the game. Here’s a comparison of the old and new speedrun badges. Turns out a professional artist can make quite a difference. 

                       ​OLD EXPLORER BADGE                                      NEW EXPLORER BADGE

Above, you can see some of our old badges alongside the new ones.
Here are some old vs new screenshots:

As you can see, we’ve changed the character model as well. In keeping with the target of an older audience of close to core gamers, we’ve made Tara a bit older and much less cartoony. Below, you can see the difference in the new and old level setup screens.