After two weeks of recharging our batteries and some strange weeks before that where I had to very suddenly move across the country, it’s me – Vilya – back to bring you new updates! I’m sure you’ll all miss Fred’s amazing summaries, but unfortunately he’s been banished to animation duty for now… :)

This week, let’s discuss what we’ve got left to do and what we’ll be focusing on in the near future:

Though 90% of the final update is done by now, as always it’s the last 10% that take the most time. Polishing cutscene and animation timings, editing sprites and backgrounds, finishing up placeholder animations… We firmly believe that the difference between an average game and a great one is your attention to details, so obviously we wante everything to be perfect (or as perfect as we can possibly make it).

Fred has a very long list of animations to do, so to help avoid too much of a bottleneck situation I’ll be helping him clean up some animations. I’m also going to make a proper background for one of the final scenes in Arcade Mode, play around with some background alternatives for the final battles in Story Mode, and edit a background for one of the later scenes in that mode as well. After that, my main focus will be playing through the final dungeon and the game as a whole to catch any last minute edits we need to make. In particular, there’s one phase of the Zhamla battle we’re not entirely satisfied with yet, but I think we’re close to getting it right.

Fred will start off this week with recording a video of the scenes and animations we need sound effects for in the battle against Dad and send them to our wonderful sound designer Fark. After that he’ll be focusing on the last bunch of Zhamla animations – some that need to be made from scratch and others simply cleaned up. Once we’re 100% done with that we’ll prepare another sound request video for that battle, after which we would have most of the sound effects needed to realease the game.

Teddy will focus on getting the final dungeon multiplayer ready. While most of it is playable in single player, making sure the network side of things work out is a different matter. He’s also been working on some post-end dialogues for various NPCs you can talk to when you start the game after defeating the final boss.

When it comes to post-end content in general, at the moment we’ve decided to add one “easter egg” scene you can come across if you explore the world a bit after finishing the story, though we might end up adding more before all is said and done.

After taking some time to clear our heads, we’re definitely pumped to begin this very last stretch of development for real. Let’s go! :D