Made Marion Development Update, December 2021
over 2 years ago – Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 03:26:28 PM

Happy Winter Solstice, and Merry Whatever Non-Avalon Holidays You May Be Celebrating This Time of Year!

I have a couple grinchy updates before we get to the presents.

1. Survey Deadline Approaching!  

We've given everyone a nice, long time to finish their backer surveys. I believe only about 30 of you remain surveyless, and you'll need to fill yours out by January 1. If you do not, your reward delivery will be a bit delayed because I'll have to do it manually through Kickstarter instead of automatically through Backerkit. Please take a minute to do the survey - it's short and you don't even need to make a Backerkit account!

2. Release Date Pushback

I've been evaluating our progress at the end of the year, and at the team's current pace, we won't be able to release at our initial goal of August 2022. I am officially adjusting our anticipated release to Q4 2022 instead.

I'm very sorry we won't be able to hit our initial goal, but as you all know, it's been a very challenging couple of years for most of the planet.  On my part - you know that town in British Columbia that hit the international news for severe flooding?  Yeah, that was my town. We've had the entire natural world drop on our heads in various incarnations (deadly heatwave, wildfire smoke quarantine, catastrophic flooding) over the last six months. And while my family has escaped the worst consequences, it's affected my spouse's work schedule and I've had to take on a much larger share of household tasks. This is only fair, because his steady job is what allows me to take a chance on starting my own business and making awesome games for all of you!

My spouse's usual work commute as of mid-November. Yeah, it was bad.

We're still making steady progress, and anticipate the beta for Robin's route to happen in late January or early February at the latest.

Now, for the goodies!

Sherwood Sprite-o-Rama

Our Sherwood love interests (minus DLC LI Layton, who is still in the sprite factory) are complete! Here's the gang!

(Bonus!  A nice look at Marion's Sherwood sprite.)

A very nice glow-up for all of them, methinks. Robin and Will have two major poses now... Will has his crossed arms pose, but also the less petulant pose you see above. Robin has his hands-on-hips pose and also a more conversational one. John just has his main pose, but he has a really cool new outfit that you'll see in the endgame. And of course there are the combat poses. I'm particularly fond of Will's.

This may be the last thing a ne'er-do-well in Nottingham's back allies sees. Yes, Will has a less ostentatious outfit for skullduggery purposes.

Home, Sweet Home

We also now have variations of the Sherwood Cabin for all our love interests. You can get a glimpse of their personalities and interests if you take a good look.

Development Miscellany:

My main development tasks right now are writing Robin's route and re-coding the Sherwood common route with the new sprites. Our code assistant/consultant Shawna has been very generous with their time and helped me set up a very nice sprite coding system so that it won't be too terribly time-consuming to work with all the amazing expressions and poses that our new sprites have to offer.

I've also recorded the voiceover for our animated lore intro. It will be four minutes long, and you'll be able to skip it after you've seen it for the first time, even if you quit the prologue without saving your game (in fact, you can choose to skip most of the prologue after you've played it through once, though you might want to play it a couple times to see the alternate scenes you get for making various choices).

As you can see from Will's picture above, I've changed how sprites are named before you know their actual name. Originally I had them listed as "???", but while doing accessibility research I realized that's not friendly for readers who are using Ren'py's self voicing feature. So instead of ???, they will now be listed with some kind of description, such as "Bandit," until you learn their name.

That's it for 2021. What a year! Speaking in Avalon dialect, here's hoping we can get a handle on this rotted pandemic in 2022. See you then!

Made Marion Development Log: November 2021
over 2 years ago – Sun, Nov 21, 2021 at 03:46:40 PM

I'm calling this the "chaos update."  Things have been a bit chaotic for much of the team this month, but sometimes that's just part of the creative process!

The Writing and Coding Department:

I've been learning that my writing process works best if I don't always try to stick to writing a single route in order. Sometimes I just get a great scene in my head and I need to write it out!  This means that I'm not able to post a neat "X Character: X Percentage Complete" chart like some devs with less chaotic brains than mine. But I'll do my best to indicate progress!

My main focus is still Robin's route, which is now scaffolded (think an outline on steroids, with descriptive paragraphs for each scene) and I'm filling in the scenes and dialogue. I'm carefully reviewing the choices in the route to make them both numerous and interesting. At various points, a Marion who is leaning more toward one personality type than the other (in Robin's route, a straightforward Marion who openly speaks her mind or a clever Marion who plays her cards more close to the chest) will have different thoughts or different dialogue with the other characters.  I hope this will make re-reads more interesting and also show how your choices really do shape Marion's personality.

I've also completed Geoffrey and Robin's lore stories for the Mega-Guide. If you're a beta backer and have joined our Discord server, you can find links to these two stories in the beta-chat topic. I've now completed all the lore stories except Alanna and Gui. They help me a lot with shaping up the characters for their in-game routes.

The Art Department:

Speaking of chaos, our lead artist Arrapso needed to take a little break from Robin this month and finished up Alanna's new sprite instead. Here's an Alanna series showing how the new sprite style lets us more easily create multiple poses.

Here's Alanna's basic pose and base expression.

Here she is with an alternate hairdo, a happy expression, and her lute-playing pose.

And here we have Combat Alanna!  You might notice this is a new background, as well. It's the Brambles, Nottingham's poorest district where Alanna grew up.

Many many thanks to our coding assistant Shawna, who helped me set up the layered sprites so that I can portray all these different poses in the game's code without typing a million words. 

Robin's base sprite is now complete, so we should have a full preview of him next month.

That's what we've got for November!  Unless you'd like a teeny tiny peek at the secret project that Sandra is working on right now.

Hmm, that eye does not look human...

Made Marion Development Update: October 2021
over 2 years ago – Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 03:00:07 PM

Happy Spooky Season, everyone!  This month's dev update is a bit shorter, as we have several large things that are still in progress. But we have some lovely tidbits to show you in the meantime!

The Writing/Coding Department:

I'm still working on writing Robin's route and plotting the Sherwood routes in general. We got some great feedback from our Discord backer community about a heist scene I'm working on. The three Sherwood leads will have unique roles in the plan, and you'll get to accompany a different lead on each route. 

I'm also finishing up Geoffrey's lore story for the Mega-Guide (I finally figured out what to do with it!) and making some large edit's to Robin's lore story. Both of them will be posted to our beta testers on Discord as a preview shortly. If you're a beta tester and haven't connected with us on Discord yet, please feel free to join us and drop me a note in the #i-need-beta-access channel!

The Art Department:

I'd like to introduce two more of our backer-designed characters! Arraspo has done a lovely job translating our backer designs into characters.

Here's Nell, the Sherwood rebellion's tailor, who you've probably met in the Sherwood demo. Backer Oui Je Danse supplied her design concept and a very cool backstory that you'll learn about in the unpublished part of the Sherwood common route.

And here's Roan, a changeling who has joined the Sherwood rebellion out of curiosity about the human society they've just joined. In my world, changelings are made by choice, and are either adult humans who have been chosen to live in Faerie or fae who have chosen to forsake their immortal lives and live as humans. Backer Charlene C. gave Roan their design concept and decided that in their former life they were a fox beastling fae. They certainly look foxlike!

Our final two backer characters are Hugh, the leader of the Grey Wolves faction in Nottingham and Issa, who is Lord Geoffrey's cousin from Nibiru. They will be completed during our Nottingham development phase.

We also have a preview of our gorgeous tarot card designs, by Lawrichai.  This sure does look better than the blank screen we have in the current Nottingham demo! I love the way Lawri mixed Avalon and Nibirian cultural concepts in the cards.

The final tarot reading scene will have animations and cards that are a bit more defined against the background.

That's our main news for October. November should have more substantial news. We do have some art progress that I'm not showing y'all, because I'm holding some things back for release. Our background and creature artist Sandra is currently working on some super neat stuff, but it's a secret.

Made Marion Development Update: September 2021
over 2 years ago – Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 07:46:22 PM

Happy fall, everyone! We're finally getting some rain here in my corner of the Pacific Northwest, which has calmed down our wildfires and given me that nice autumnal feeling. It's my favourite season, which of course is why Made Marion is set during the... summer.

Pilot Beta Update:

Our pilot beta test is well underway!  Thanks so much to all our beta backers who have given me tons of invaluable feedback. You've caught my typos and helped me slay my big bugaboo, missing nameplates (when a character is supposed to be saying something but their name doesn't appear above the dialog box). 

You've also given me some great general suggestions and feedback! I'm happy to report that Marion's father is a divisive figure, as I had hoped. In the game, you'll get to choose whether Marion breaks off her relationship entirely or leaves the door open for reconciliation. This choice will be reflected in numerous route endings.

I'll be keeping the beta client up until the end of September, so if you're a beta tester and haven't checked it out yet, you still have time! Check our previous, backer-exclusive update for information about joining the beta (or finding out whether you're a beta backer, if you forgot).

The Writing/Coding Department:

Our accessibility options have been implemented!  They weren't quite done in time to be added to the beta client, but y'all will be able to use them or test them in all future betas.

Many of these options are already baked into Ren'py, but we've moved them from a hidden menu to our main Options menu.  You now have three font options and the ability to enlarge any font for easier reading. If any of our animations bother you, you have three kinds of animations to toggle on or off - combat, magic, or screen shake. In our example screenshot, the player has turned off screen shaking, but will still see combat and magic animations.

We've adapted our user interface to allow for larger font sizes across the board. In the above example, the player is using Opendyslexic font at a large size. This causes some of our longer lines to overflow the text box, so a scrollbar appears. Players can drag it or use the scroll wheel to read the extra text.

Thanks so much to Shawna for taking charge of our accessibility coding! It's turned out great, and we've made some nice general changes to the UI layout as well (notice that the "Return" button is now much easier to spot).

As for writing, our update is a bit early this month because I'm headed off for a week's vacation, which will also be serving as a writing retreat. I'll be working on Robin's route while relaxing by Lake Oakanagan. It should be inspirational!

The Art Department:

Arraspo is busy with the rest of the main character sprite rehauls. Several of them are near complete, and John is finished. Here's our new John design, which really gets across his size (he's the famous Little John, after all!) while maintaining his gentle demeanor. I love his new hairdo, and I'm not complaining about the tighter cut of his shirt, either.

These smaller screenshots don't do justice to his golden eyes. Rest assured they look quite nice in the game.

It's ok if you're distracted by Marion's new "wet" velvet dress. I think it's helps sell the fact that John later gives her his cloak to cover up!

That's it for September, hope you all are also enjoying this lovely autumn as best you can while this darn pandemic keeps sticking around. Stay safe!

Made Marion PILOT BETA is coming! Beta backers please read!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 01:18:38 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.