Whispers in the Moss / April devlog

It's been a while! My last devlog was published 143 days ago, but let that not fool you: I've been working hard to get Whispers in the Moss released as soon as possible. After taking a two-month break from gamedev, I've been back since early February, adding lots of new maps and content and spicing up the gameplay in various ways. Here's a rundown of what's new. If you're interested in more regular updates, consider following me on Twitter (@UnculturedGames).

NEW ENVIRONMENTS

After Ulgum, Greenmoon, Ruegrove and Mount Erelis, our party enters the last main area in the game: the outskirts of Armand, followed by the grand capital city itself. It's getting increasingly difficult to present the new areas without giving away too much spoilers, but I'll do my best. Armand is surrounded by old orchards, now largely overwhelmed by fiends. Our party enters the orchards during a night with a fierce thunderstorm, so it's best to stay on the road.

After some events, our party finds themselves locked up in the Armand Prison.  The prison sequence is short, but has lots of content and even some mini-puzzles. I wanted the prison to seem huge and dystopian, and I think the parallax effect gives it a nice sense of space. 

The icing on the cake that I've been working on, however, is the city of Armand itself. Lore-wise and artistically, it's a clear deviation from the earlier, more traditional fantasy locations of the game, and might require me to go back and work on some stuff just to make it fit inside the game's universe better. Armand is a depraved technology-rich city, home to neon lights and 24/7 markets, and is inspired by cyberpunk and places like FF7's Midgard. The heart of the city is the Rollotron (thanks to our friend Adel Faure for coming up with this great name!), an autonomous transportation machine, that you will have to ride in order to access the various districts of the town. I'm about half-way finished with the city's design. 

JUICING UP THE BATTLES

Since the last devlog, I've created around 15 new monsters. I've also taken lots of time to spice up the battle system in various ways:

• Improved visuals, animations and effects, knockbacks, etc. to make the battles more tangible
• New types of enemy attacks
• Randomly triggering limit break attacks added to all characters
• "Special fights": I've also been adding specific new features to certain key battles in order to make them more interesting and unique. For example, a robot-type boss can be beaten by stealing its bolts, which will disconnect its cannons one by one, eventually neutralizing it completely (idea by sd3mon on twitter, thank you!). This is something I have to go back and work on with many earlier (boss) fights as well.
• Orbs: Monsters now occasionally drop glowing orbs that can be picked up after the battle. There are different types of orbs, the most common ones restore a small amount of HP/MP.
• New skills? I'm still thinking of various low-work / high-reward type solutions to add more player agency and spice to the battles. The battle system is very simple on purpose (think 8-bit Final Fantasy), but giving it a bit more optional complexity shouldn't hurt anyone. For example, I've been considering a bomb-crafting skill (craft bombs from enemy loot during battles or in special crafting locations?) and some summon / companion type extra skills. If implemented, these will be very simple, just an additionalthing for the player to do in battles.

WHAT'S NEXT?

That's not all, I've also created the in-game world map, added an optional custom color palette for all the CGA haters out there and even tried to compose some of the first tunes for the game. I play a couple of instruments and have composed music before, but I have to admit I'm a bit rusty in that regards, so we'll see.

The city of Armand with its design, all of its gameplay elements and side-quest content should keep me occupied for a good while. After that, we're really starting to approach the ending of the game, but several dungeon-type areas will still have to be created, and of course there's a massive backlog of little things that are unfinished. I might also take a moment to join a game jam this spring because I have really cool game idea that I want to prototype.

See you next time!

PS. Check out and download my Lost Cartridge Jam entry Denis McCrane's Ski Jumping Challenge from last year! It was disqualified because I ignored the rules, but who the hell cares! :D)