Toasty: Ashes of Dusk DevLog - November 2021

Happy November Toasty fam! I hope all of you had a very lovely and safe Thanksgiving, and are ready to move into the December holidays. October was a bit of a slower month for development as we were addressing a lot of tricky structural things and there was not much to report, however, Faulty did prevail and we have moved onto play testing the first boss fight, Roxide! More details on this to come in just a few with other fun points we have also been up to. Strap in because we got some fun stuff for yah!

Here we go with the big deets. I will break up the update into 4 main categories this time: Art/Assets, Programming, Narrative/Concept , and Community.

Art / Assets

A lot of October’s work was based around art and asset work which also continued into November full swing. Brian and Ivy have been very busy whipping up both concept work, and finalized assets for Avarice City to be input into the game. Though there is still much work to be done, we made some great head way here including some of the following:

• Started working on Avarice City outdoor & building exterior assets
•  Turning concept art of city NPCs into finalized sprites
• Interior room work on some major scenes (Such as the theatre)
• HUD UI assets for the Roxide boss fight

Programming

As mentioned at the beginning Faulty has had his hands full building the internal framework for the Roxide boss battle and getting multiple ingame mechanics to work fluidly so that way it will be easier for us to implement these mechanics into other areas of the game. So here are some programming details for the Roxide prototype:

• Controls

[WASD] - Movement
[Space/Shift] - Roll
[H] - Shield
[J] - Sword
[K] - Knapsack
[L] - Hammer (even though you won't have that at this point in the game but just for funsies)

• Control testing for both PC and Controller use
• Mapping out the Intro & Death sequences
• Knapsack adjustments - you can no longer collide with it which means you can no longer push or pull it, but you can lift up still. However, this may change in the future to allow for these mechanics to be used during this fight, nothing is final here.
• Getting hurt or doing any other action will cause you to either drop or throw the knapsack
• Working out the combat sequences for the two stages of the boss battle
•  Implemented HUD UI changes

Narrative / Concept

So there have been two major pushes here when it comes to this category. As briefly mentioned, Ivy has been in full swing drafting up all of the concept artwork for the Avarice City NPCs and other artwork for our Kickstarter campaign. In terms of the narrative side, Justin has been banging out getting the dialogue and portrait images made for more of our beautiful Shroomville characters!

• Worked on Avarice City NPCs, their art palette and emotions
• Dialog box work and speech placement
• Implementing portraits to the dialog boxes and bringing life to the characters in game

Community

We have had some things on the community front pick up a bit over the last few weeks! With our new Community Manager addition to the team, we have been working out how we can improve the community experience in a multitude of ways. Some of them you may have already noticed, but there is much work still to be done.

• Reviewed and Edited the current Discord Structure
• Added new moderation bots to Discord
• Added fun Toasty stickers to the Discord server
• Reviewing the editing the Steam storefront (This is in works but not yet completed)
• Getting the Steam community forums up and running and getting the community hub up to date

In a nutshell, this is pretty much the gist of it without going into too much detail! Our team is really pumped and motivated to work on and improve Toasty: Ashes of Dusk in so many ways. Especially since the announcement of our Kickstarter campaign which is to take place in Spring 2022! We are almost at 500 followers on our Kickstarter page, and we cannot thank you enough, especially those who have shared this page with your friends and family!

If you have not already followed and would like to join the list to be first to know when we launch, you can click below to follow!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pocketllama/toasty-ashes-of-dusk

Until Next Month!

Your Toasty:AoD Marketing Manager,

Tanya - AKA Tannyerz