We're entering the last days of the Alpha cycle!
I still have some work to do on the Alpha, but sometime next week the demo will get the almighty Beta status, hooray!
Note that the online demo gets updated about twice a week, so if you're trying the Alpha now, you'll be playing a much closer version to the Beta.
Now, let's talk a little about music.
I got some feedback from players saying they were disappointed I didn't do any rock or metal music in the demo.
While my favorite music genres are rock and metal, I do not believe in forcing it in, sometimes the mood of the game/scene requires something different and I'm always up to diving into different musical genres.
My first game, Bad Pad, was full of rock and metal, but that was an action packed platformer, so the aggression and chops worked well for it, at least in my humble opinion. Now, that doesn't mean I'm not planning on doing some rock and metal for this game, obviously I will, there's no escaping that. But it will probably accompany more intense or action based situations.
So, I started this week with some more music work, I wrote a few more musical ideas and a dedicated theme for Mikey's house. This is still a pre production demo and will probably go through more arrangement changes, but it gives the feel and vibe I wanted in the house scenes. Calm, safe and relaxed. The previous music track will play in the neighborhood scenes and I need to make another one for the beach scenes (possibly with a rock vibe, but something happy and upbeat).
I worked on the intro bedroom night scene.
I worked on Mikey's walking forward animation.
I pushed this one back and avoided it till the last minute since I remembered the nightmare of making the side walking animation.
Walk cycles are probably the hardest and more timing consuming things for me so far.
I've spent two days on these 8 frames and it's still a bit wonky, but I'm on it!
Lastly, on the technical side I added a new settings option to control the subtitles and captions size.