DevLog #52: August 2020

Hi everyone!

I've made really good progress this month working on episode 2 of my JRPG series Light Fairytale.

This is the main reason why I've finally decided to release it on early access with full content day one - as this should still happen this year.

The second reason is that I think this is still a very short game - around 3-4 hours for a first playthrough, so releasing an even shorter version would probably hurt the reviews / sales.

Anyway, as planned I've completed the 2nd half of the Ice Lair including 2 more boss battles!

I've also implemented most of the locations and events for the 3rd and last part of episode 2: The snow forest.

I'm now missing only one location in the forest and I'll have the full episode playable from start to finish!

I also need to implement a few missing battles and features, then I will start the finalization process.

If I can keep this pace I should complete this episode within 2 months.

I think a release in mid-November would be perfect - exactly 2 years after the early access of episode 1, and also just before the end of the year's craziness - the fall / winter sales etc.

The day one early access will still be missing a few things such as the Japanese translation and Linux support, but I'll work on that during EA which should last less than 3 months this time - EA for episode 1 lasted 6 months.

Now, here's a quick throwback, the same scene from Light Fairytale in 3 development stages:

This is a concept from 2013, running on Android using a custom engine and self-made assets!

This one is a prototype from 2014, I've switched to Unity 4 on PC, still using self-made assets.

And finally the 2020 version, running on PC using Unity 2019, with commissioned assets. This is the current work-in-progress build from episode 2.

You might ask why make a scene from episode 2 so early in the development? Well, initially I was planning a different type of narration, the famous 2-1-3 order. Basically starting with the fall scene (beginning of episode 2), then having a few flashbacks from episode 1 (the minimum needed to understand the story), and finally the next events from episode 2.

So overall, the episode 1 I was planning initially for the KickStarter was packing events from the current episode 1 and 2, but missing many scenes and way shorter.

Bonus, here's a 4K wallpaper featuring the mysterious girl from the Light Fairytale series. 

This artwork will be used for the cover of the soundtrack of episode 2 (OST 2). 

And that's it!

Thank you so much for your support. We're getting there!

See you next time!