Posted September 26, 2023 by Kinky Fridays
Sapphire Safari has turned 2 years old! She has come leaps and bounds since we started building our game! To celebrate this fantastic happening, and the two years of labor we've poured into the game we have a 50% off sale running for the next four weeks. Get in while you can!
As for a look back, the earliest stuff we have is quite cringy but I figured I would contrast it with the progression of work so you can all see how we started and where we have ended up.
First, let's look at our mascot for the game, our lovely bunny girl!
Originally we wanted a Lola Bunny-type look, realised it was... erm... not... great. And moved more toward a cuter type of mascot.
The characters in the game swapped around considerably as well, mostly due to our experimentations with the art pipeline and attempting to find a perfect balance so our small team could build all the important things we needed.
The next reference piece is our our game looked and felt overall over the past 18 iterations of releases.
We quickly found our desired look, but the mechanics grew and changed a whole lot.
Sapphire Safari started as an on-rails shooter, moved to a semi-open world on-rails shooter, then became an open-world voxel-based exploration game, moved onto a small semi-open-world shooter, then finally a fully open-world shooter with a focus on calendar events and quests.
The current iteration has found a perfect spot for our team, both in what we can build, and what we want this game to ultimately become. We still have a lot to decide on, specifically around how the end game feels. For now, the motions the player goes through, the overall focus, and the goals the players will have have all been found. I want to thank our lovely community for giving us this chance to experiment and find Sapphire Safari in all our experiments. We hope you'll join us for the final push to a full game!
Much love!
Kinky