Hey friends! The first month of the year is already drawing to a close. Is it just me or is time flying by too fast? Today I’m sharing a walk I went on, tease an upcoming Bibidi update (new character!) and share a little about its future planning.
How Am I Doing?
I’m feeling good, but I have been working a lot and all that coding made me a little foggy-brained. Because of that, I force myself to go on long walks every other day. This weekend I did the Coulée Verte René-Dumont: an old tram track that’s (relatively) recently been converted to a beautiful park promenade.
It goes through the city almost straight as the crow flies, which makes it kind of weird in a fun way. At one point you’re going underneath tunnels that they installed wall art at, then you’re in the middle of a green manmade valley and then suddenly you’re walking flush with the fifth floor of buildings.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but as a person from the flattest country on earth, I love any type of verticality. Be it mountains or walkways that cross between buildings and over streets.
Apart from that, I picked up music again after a really long time! I have an electric guitar at home, as well as a handpan that have been collecting dust for a while. Jamming out, as well as doing some composing really helps me blow off steam, so it’s great to reconnect with that part of myself. Maybe I’ll share some tunes soon.
What Am I Doing?
We’re chipping away on a pretty big Bibidi update in which you unlock our first additional playable character. Introducing Oppipi the Untried!
Oppipi is a young wizard’s apprentice who read the right stuff in the wrong books. Ever since then, they’ve been afflicted with curses that periodically manifest themselves on the most basic of magics. Despite that, Oppipi can still cast powerful single-incantation spells.
Their play style is pretty straightforward, and it’s supposed to lend itself to turning your drawbacks into your strengths. Cursed cards with negative side effects can be used as a resource to boost your overall power, and your lower Mana Burn threshold allows you to spec into builds around that faster.
We initially planned to have this update out already, but in my fervor of adding a bunch of new content, I broke a bunch of systems, so we postponed it to next week. That way we can do a lot of balance and QA testing.
Why Am I Doing? (this)
After the new character is out, it essentially means we’re done with the game’s core systems and officially feature complete! What does that mean? It means we can focus purely on polishing, content, bug fixing and extras. The game is in a good place right now. People react positively to seeing the marketing materials and actually playing the game. We have a small group of repeat players and our wishlist count is creeping up slowly but steadily.
There’s a Steam event in May that we’d like an official Demo for. That should be an extremely polished version of the game with limited content. The whole experience has to be designed to grip players immideatly as well as sell what the full experience should be. At that point, we’ll probably take the public playtests offline, so go try it out now before it’s gone!