Hola!
Here’s your well deserved update on Lost Ember. Enjoy!
Let’s start with… drumroll…
The Song?! Maaaan, it was about time! ^^
You can finally get hold of the full song from our teaser trailer, composed and recorded by our sound wizards (formerly known as Rockstar’s sound wizards), Will and Craig. We also prepared an awesome video including the lyrics, for you to sing along with. Have fun!
Pre-order Store Launch
We decided to sneak the development of a pre-order store into our past milestone. As this is obviously some extra work, we wanted to let you know why we decided to do so:
- As you know, we did not reach our big goal to stay completely independent. Now is basically our last chance to make sure we can go without a publisher. As we’re still in love with that idea, we thought we’d take another shot at it.
- Ever since the Kickstarter campaign ended, we’ve had loads of people writing how they discovered Lost Ember a little too late and how disappointed they were for not being able to pitch in. And we wanted to do something about that.
- Quite a lot of you lovely people were asking for additional ways to support us. We are always happy and thankful for you guys spreading the word but we were also looking for a way to give you rewards for helping us out. That’s what the karma points are for. Don’t worry, we’ll explain later ^^
What else is new?
As you can see, we’ve had a couple of extra things on our plates the last couple of months, but no worries, we’ve also made good progress on the game itself. First of all, we managed to block out the whole world (basically means it’s kind of ugly but functional :D)!
This gives us the opportunity to test if the pacing and duration of the whole game actually works out in reality. And you know what? It’s pretty close to what we had in mind and that’s really good news. That means we can move on and not rework too much.
We also gave some love to the buffalo, the hummingbird and the goat which are now playable in a rough state, but are actually already fun.
We’ve also worked on some new effects and mechanics. And when we played through the new areas together (our idea of a team building event), we already got an idea of the benefit for the experience. Playing the game in it’s “entirety” (slight exaggeration :D) also triggered some super productive late night discussions that led to really cool new ideas that we cannot wait to put into action. But as you can probably imagine, it wouldn’t be a very good idea to go into detail, as we don’t want to spoil the game for you ^^
What’s next?
After we finished the last milestone, we sat together to figure out what would be most beneficial to do in the next milestone and decided to focus on story and feel. We plan to work rough versions of all story elements into the game, including dummy VO recordings, to get a better idea of the emotional experience throughout the game. We’ll obviously continue working on different animals and tweaking what we already have. We call his our “emotional prototype”. ^^
Oh, and also…
As we realised that we were spending way too much time on administrative work, organizing and communications, rather than working on the game itself, we took a producer on board a couple of weeks ago. Her name is Sinikka and she’s freeing up so much time for us to work on Lost Ember. We’re very happy to have her on the team. Get to know her here: http://blog.mooneyestudios.com/62-the-new-girl.
