Hey friends! Hope y’all are doing well. After a small planning error, we’re back on track with Bibidi and I’d love to show you some of the stuff we’re working on. Check it out!

How Am I Doing?

I’m good! After the initial cortisol spike of the Steam Next Fest deadline jump scare, I’ve cooled down a bit and kicked myself into gear. In a way, I think I needed this time pressure to get me motivated again. There’s a lot left to do and no real time to sit down to think, so let’s just jump straight into what I’ve been working on for Bibidi Bibidi!

What Am I Doing?

We’ve decided to merge a bunch of milestones and re-prioritize what exactly we should finish for the Demo build for Next Fest. First and foremost, we decided to get rid of the Quest system for now and go for a more conventional method, in which you collect currency called Stardust by playing.

There’s a couple of reasons why we’re making this change. Players didn’t seem to engage with the Quest system all that much. The Quests just kind of “happen” to you. Also, the pacing was hard to control for us as developers. Some players would finish the game in one go, and unlock ten quests, and some players wouldn’t unlock anything at all, even if they came pretty far.

With this new system, you have agency over what you want to unlock, and a direct interaction to collect and buy rewards, which makes it a bit more engaging. It’s going to be important to balance the pace for this new system though, so we’re going to have to playtest a lot!

Apart from that, we’re essentially just focusing completely on polish. Music, art, sound effects, visual effects, juice and possibly some user interface overhauls.

Here, for example, you can see the improved Zap animation and consequent death visual effects. The sounds are also improved, so it does feel pretty juicy to blow up enemies at the moment. It’s been a blast to work on this kind of thing, because they’re usually pretty quick to get done and the game feels so much better for it.

And then finally, we’re also putting in content “previews”, so that people who play the Demo understand that the final game will be a lot bigger than it is right now. Chief among them, a little sneak preview for potential future classes.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

So yeah, after messing about with controller support for most of April, and it feels good to finally make some tangible progress again. I’m excited but also a bit scared of Next Fest. It’s a bit of a make and break moment. If the Demo does well, it validates we can keep working at it until we eventually self-publish the game, according to plan. If it doesn’t… There’s some questions we need to answer regarding marketing, potential publishers and most crucially for me: finances.