- On Hold - 23 October 2023
This was a tough one to write. On September 11 we received the final asset for Reina & Jericho: a redesign of the 3d mesh for the last boss fight in the game. Less than 24 hours later, on September 12, we received news that Unity, the provider of the engine that Reina is built in, was making significant changes to their revenue model. There has been plenty written about the Unity issues online, and Unity has walked back some of their changes, but I’ll focus on the result of it all here. One of the main challenges has been that the online discourse centered largely around an installation fee, which was a pain, but not the main impediment to smaller developers. I don’t want to get into a long conversation about the specifics, but the ultimate result is that free projects are largely unaffected, but smaller projects designed to be sold (like Reina & Jericho) aren’t super viable over the me…
- Before and After - 27 June 2023
We’ve spent a lot of time and effort working on the environment art for the various areas within the world of Reina & Jericho. Although some of the areas were in decent enough shape for the simplified aesthetic we wanted to create, there were others that were barely more than white-box layouts of the game world, and they need work quite badly. Reina & Jericho has 3d art but is still a side-scrolling game, so we wanted to keep the middle-plane of the environment relatively clean so Reina, the enemies she is fighting, and the platforming obstacles she interacts with would all read clearly. That said we still wanted to make the world simply look and feel better, and we wanted to help differentiate different areas from one another. Check out this screenshot near the beginning of the Machine Shop biome: Reina has been given a strong rim-light to help her pop against the background (and a sma…
- Loading the Game World - 24 April 2023
It takes time to load a video game. Whether it happens all at once in one big loading event that gets it all done up front or it is broken up into smaller pieces and loaded in smaller chunks (or even streamed in while the game is running), the game data needs to end up in memory somehow. On top of this, players don't all have the same preference of one solution compared to another. Our original strategy was to load the entire game world in one shot so the game would have no loading screens at any other point. Unfortunately some players didn’t like the idea of having to wait for 30-45 seconds right at the start, especially if they didn’t know in advance that they wouldn’t be exposed to any more loading delays until they closed the game. So… it was time to rewrite some code to allow the game to be loaded in smaller chunks. Unfortunately this changed one of the core assumptions about how t…
- Back to Work - 22 November 2022
After a few months with Reina & Jericho on the backburner while we assisted another studio and made the money we needed to continue, we’re finally starting to ramp up work on Reina again (although our attention will be divided for a while). This does mean the release date will be bumped to 2023, but we finally have the resources to give the environment art an extra pass and tidy up a few other things we’ve decided we want to tidy up. If the feedback from the public on recent game releases has reinforced one thing, it’s that it’s worth taking the time to squash a few extra bugs rather than release a game before it is ready. A side benefit of this whole affair has been the clarity that comes with time. When you work on a game (or any other project) every day you become familiar with it, and you don’t see it with the same degree of objectivity that a stranger would. In short, the more you…
- Double Crunch Time! - 29 August 2022
Most of the time we talk about game development things in these posts, but in this case it’s about the business side of things. Reina & Jericho is very close to completion, but we had one dilemma which is that since we were near the end of the development cycle, we were also low on money. We mostly use money to buy things like electricity, food, and software licenses. It’s helpful stuff. Our bank account was low enough that, despite crunching, we weren’t on pace to be able to stay afloat financially after release. There is a two- or three-month lag between when a game goes on sale and when the revenue finally reaches the publisher (in this case: us) and more than one good studio has been forced to shut down despite finishing their game, releasing, and having strong sales figures. You may think to yourself “If their game was selling well couldn’t they just find a _____ to lend them money…
- The Beginning, the Middle, and the End - 5 July 2022
Last week I finished working on a very special part of the game. Here is a small part of a screenshot from it: That’s not just any regular “The End” – we have multiple endings after all. That’s “The End” from the last ending. They are all done. Since the game is (mostly) coded chronologically that also means the game is mostly done, and that led me to an unusual experience that I hadn’t had in a while: I wasn’t working on anything on the game anymore. There’s no shortage of tickets with various bugs and tasks or pieces of paper covered in notes regarding things I need to do lying around, but an entire chain of work starting from the beginning of development and lasting for years has reached its conclusion. It’s exciting stuff. That doesn’t mean we’re done quite yet though. This past week has been focused on getting a cutscene-centric version of the game world built to help smooth out th…
- Voice Acting - 7 May 2022
The plan from the start for Reina & Jericho was to have the game fully voiced. Somewhere along the way we gave up on that as a cost-saving measure, but we had the opportunity to work with some voice actors from Funimation to handle the various vocalizations. When a character gets hit and lets out a grunt of pain, well, someone needs to make the grunting sound. We had a great group of professional voice actors to work with to record those sounds, so we did. And in theory that was going to be the end of it for the time being. Then we needed to make a trailer for PAX. Which we did. And it worked well enough without any voice over, but it worked better with Reina’s voice actor recording a few lines, so we had a quick recording session and that was it. I told the voice actors that we would investigate recording voiceover for a future release of the game, but we didn’t have the time or the mo…
- The Closing Act - 9 April 2022
I’ve mentioned this before, but whenever I write one of these updates, I like to include a few pictures or gifs of what we’ve been working on. Unfortunately, I have been working on the ending cutscenes of the entire game and I *also* don’t want to spoil any of that, so let’s just focus on the to-do list this time. Development isn’t 100% complete, but we are well past the 90% mark. Once the end-run scenario for Reina & Jericho is done there is still work to be done, but we will be in a state where the game could be considered done at any moment. There are a few dozen bugs that need to be addressed, most of them of the minor variety. Generally, these are squashed quickly (although occasionally, a bug comes along that forces a ton of rework). There are a few new features that would be nice to add, many of which center around map usability or edge case management. For example, we have “coyo…
- The Testing Grind - 19 February 2022
Everyone has been crunching hard for the last several weeks as we rush to finish off Reina & Jericho. The game has been very close to feature complete for a while, but there is still content that needs to be designed or improved. And bugs. Lots of bugs. Lately the focus has been on two things: finishing off the boss fights, and testing the level design throughout the game for both platforming difficulty and routing issues. Routing in Metroidvania games is a challenge, and in the case of Reina & Jericho it has a few added layers of complexity because time travel always adds layers of complexity. Thus far the bug rate has been very normal, but the actual traversal and routing issues have been quite minimal. All of this is either good news because the levels were designed well, or bad news because no one found any of the mistakes. Time will tell! The other big achievement from the last few…
- Reina & Jericho: Year in Review - 24 December 2021
After working crazy hours for the last few months we’re taking a break (mostly) until the New Year, so I thought I’d take the time to recap what we’ve been up to for the year and look at what remains to be done. Originally the plan was to release around Christmas 2021 (i.e., now-ish) but a bug called “not being ready” came up and we’re still working to resolve it. We also had some marketing opportunities we were hoping to leverage fall through, so we’ve bumped the release date to 2022. On the one hand the delayed release is disappointing, on the other, it does allow us to do things like get voice acting for the entire game recorded, which has been what we’ve been working on a lot for the last week or two. About 75% of the game script has been recorded with the rest slated to be finished in January. Due to the complexities of the way time flows in Reina & Jericho this has been an interes…
- Pivoting to Level Aesthetics - 26 November 2021
The plan was to work on boss fights and cutscenes for the next little while, but scheduling issues forced us to pivot to try to hammer out the last of the biome aesthetics by the end of the month. We, like all games in the action-exploration/Metroidvania style, draw a lot of inspiration from Super Metroid, which is still the gold standard for the genre (sorry, Metroid Dread). Super Metroid did one normal thing and one clever thing relevant to our discussion. The game has about 6 biomes, and each biome has an overall aesthetic style. This is the normal thing they did. They also have subthemes within each biome that differentiate different areas within a biome as well, and that is the clever part. For example, Brinstar is the second biome the player explores, and it has a theme of vegetation. It is further subdivided into four or five subthemes. These subthemes still preserve the same ide…
- Dev Update: Designing the Zealot Boss Fight - 13 November 2021
There may be someone out there who finds designing boss fights easy but it’s not me. It’s difficult to strike the right balance between challenging skilled players without overwhelming less experienced ones, making the battle feel both intense but still fun, making it difficult for the player to “cheese” the boss fight, and making it feel unique from other boss fights without being gimmicky. With all that in mind I spent a lot of time working on the “Zealot” boss fight these past two weeks. If you’ve completed the demo of Reina & Jericho then you’ve defeated his partner, the Inquisitor. This is important because the two should feel somewhat related but be tactically opposites. The Inquisitor possesses the artifact that grants Reina the ability to dash. When she fights the Inquisitor, he has it and she doesn’t, so he’s the one dashing around all over the place, moving at a speed Reina ca…
- Grunt Work - 29 October 2021
In most games when a character performs an attack or is on the receiving end of one, they make a noise, and Reina & Jericho is no different in that regard. Every single yell, grunt, gasp, and groan needs to be recorded. No big deal: we’re done that already. Usually there is a bit of audio processing that needs to be done too. Again: not a big deal, that’s already done. But that leaves one incredibly simple but boring task: breaking them up into individual sounds. We have these nice long recordings of our voice actors grunting 100 times in a row, but when Reina hits a boss with her sword we don’t need them to yelp 100 times in a row, we need them to do it just once. Which means that big old file with 100 grunts needs to be chopped up into 100 files with 1 grunt each. It ain’t pretty, it ain’t fun, but it’s a task that needs to be done. And that’s been my morning. These last two weeks hav…
- Dev Update: Platforming and Movement Mechanics - 15 October 2021
Although I usually describe Reina & Jericho as a story-driven Metroidvania, the fact is it sits between a lot of different genres. The combat and movement is inspired by games like Mega Man X and there are platforming influences from games like Celeste. Metroidvania games typically have *some* platforming influences but they tend to not go too deep. Some of this is for good reason – if a player is backtracking across a screen four or five times they probably don’t want to do a difficult jumping problem over and over. That said, there are still lots of nooks and crannies where we can tuck away little challenges, usually for minor health power ups or bonuses of that sort. These past two weeks I have been working on these very platforming segments, so lets talk about them! Reina’s core movement skills are already quite impressive - she can run, jump, dash (in mid air or along the ground),…
- Dev Update: Solidifying the Level Designs - 1 October 2021
Last update we talked about level design. This time we are also talking about level development. It sounds very similar but this one is less fun and more about brute force. Our workflow for designing the levels has multiple phases. The first involves using our level editor to move blocks and position objects and represents the more creative side of things, and it is good for making things from scratch and performing small adjustments like moving terrain around if a jump is too far or the path the player needs to take is too ambiguous, etc. That is what we had (more or less) wrapped up last update. Now we move on two phase two: Lamination. I call it lamination but meshing or topologizing would also be good words for it. Our level generator does not create optimal 3d geometry, so the next step is to take the crude forms from the level editing tool and “trace” over them using 3d tools to c…
- Let's Play Reina & Jericho! - 24 September 2021
It's time for a Let's Play of Reina and Jericho from our lead dev, Dave. He walks through part of the game and chats about a bit of the process. Join us here and then wishlist Reina & Jericho on Steam today!
- Development update - 17 September 2021
I've been putting off writing these updates largely been because I'm not 100% sure what to put in them, so I'm going to give it a stab, and if you want to know something else you let me know. My plan right now is to post an update every two weeks about the recent development that has been happening on Reina & Jericho. I've got a reminder in my calendar and everything. The big story of the last two weeks has been level design for the game. Now, while I'd like to be able to tell you that the level design for the entire game is complete, the truth is there are about three rooms that need to be moved. Yes, we are that close, but technically speaking we're not quite done. At the time I got my reminder to write a Steam update the entire game map was completed and perfectly aligned except for three rooms. So it won't sound quite as cool when I drop the biggest news item for this update, but he…
- Demo Update for Pax East Online - 17 July 2021
We've made a few major updates to the Reina & Jericho demo, but in celebration of being selected to the PAX East Indie showcase we released our biggest update yet. I'll keep the exciting stuff at the top and then more patch-notes sort of stuff down below. First and foremast, we've made a ton of improvements to things from animation, to Reina's movement timing, environment visuals, and a ton of bug fixes. We also introduced a new game mode for speed running that is unlocked after you complete the demo normally one time. Right from the outset of development we knew we wanted to make Reina & Jericho a good speed game by giving Reina good movement abilities (especially the artifact from the Inquisitor), but also having good support for that way of playing the game. Some players started timing themselves as they played through the demo multiple times though, so we figured we'd get speed run…
- Reina & Jericho Developer Demo Stream - 9 June 2021
We'll be playing through the opening area, talking about Reina & Jericho, and chatting with viewers about what's coming up next for the game!
