NuclearStrawberry

Cleru rides the sundog!

Shimmering in the Sky

Here's the background music for Cleru's hometown, Angelwing Islands. This took a while, but it was worth it! 😄

Cleru takes the warp!

We finished the level start sequence! (Aside from the sound)

These are some warp pads. A pair of them get created whenever a shooting star crashes through the clouds and lands on the surface, linking the two spots it hits for a week or two. It's a really quick way to travel and explore, but it can be a bit rough if you're not used to it!

Sundogs!

This is a Sundog! They make perfect pets, but you can't keep them indoors at night or you won't be able to get to sleep. They're just the right size that fluffs can ride them to get around faster, but be careful not to fall off when it starts doing flips and rolls!

🎹

Every song in the game has a piano version for when you're resting on a bench or if you've left it paused for a while. Here's one of them!

Ball lightning

This is a ball lightning! It's a little critter that lives in the sky. It's pretty chaotic and skittish, but maybe you can find a way to feed it anyway?

Sheep music

Here's the music for the moonfloof town!

The Sanctorium of the Sun

Potamus

This is a potamus! It's really hungry and it's in the way.

Screenshot dump

Here's a few random screenshots that didn't fit into any bigger post. Most of our time lately has been spent on spoiler stuff, finishing up the first main chapter of the game, but there's still a ways to go even for that! There's a few bosses left to make, and a lot of cutscene work.

Recently I had to make 4 different versions of the Aidoneus intro cutscene based on what's happened beforehand, like if you've seen one of the dogs before, or if you just bring one right there without being prompted! It's been difficult to make a game that's both exploration-based and story-based, since it needs to feel natural no matter what order you do things in. I think it's absolutely worth it, though!

A short update

I know there hasn't been much activity here, so thanks to everyone who's still a patron! Times like this are when your support's appreciated the most, so thank you for your patience.

First, for Sunfluffs, we've still been working hard on it, but it's been spoilers that I don't want to show until later, so that's one reason for not having many posts ready.

But the main thing is that I (Azure) have been going through some pretty serious depression for the past month, and it's starting to wear off a little, but to be honest it's still pretty bad. From an objective standpoint, things have been better than ever, and there's some good changes happening in our lives in the next few months, so I'm hoping I can work through this with the help of Raibys and other people close to me.

I don't mean to bring the mood down, but I just wanted to be transparent about what's been going on. Again, thank you all for still being here, it means a lot! ❤

Photography

Sometimes you see a cool bird and you wanna take a picture of it. And you absolutely can! Pull out your camera, and you have as much time as you want to line up the perfect shot.

Once you've taken some photos of stuff, next time you find a nice spot to sit down and rest, Cleru writes about it all!

If you take a bunch of photos because the bird's really good, you can pick the one you like best, and that one'll be used for its journal entry. There's also a general-use album that you can save all your miscellaneous photos to, or if there's more than one good pic of a certain critter.

And of course, Cleru can write about all the fluffs and floofs you meet too:

Photography is entirely optional, but if you like taking games nice and slowly, I hope you have lots of fun with it!

New music!

Thanks for your patience with our lack up updates recently. There's been a lot going on, and most of the new content has been spoilers. Here's some new music though! 🎵

Cleru tries to wake up a dog

Cleru and Aidoneus

Here's a cutscene we just finished. It ended up pretty elaborate, but it was worth it!

Aidoneus's trick is the Eight of Comets, which lets them put Trinkets back in the capsule. They usually use this for mischief though... like giving a powerful, dangerous artifact to their dog Rus.

Star potato

This is a star potato! It's a harmless critter that lives in the caves, digging around to look for food. It's sightless, so it's frightened by noises like footsteps, and it's really difficult to approach... but if you're very patient and gentle, you might be able to make friends with one!

The Sky

This is the Sky! Most Sunfluffs live up here, in small houses built mostly out of Cloudstone. It can be a bit chilly up here if you're not used to it, but the clouds and rainbows are really nice and fluffy to walk on!

Because they can be blown around by the strong winds up here, the clouds are in different positions every day. If a fluff isn't good enough at ear-flying, they might need someone else's help to get around sometimes, especially if their house ends up being stranded.

Falling off the clouds isn't fatal to fluffs because they're so soft and light, but it can be a huge pain to find a warp pad to get back up, and the surface can be pretty dangerous at night. You don't see many Moonfloofs up here because of the risk of falling, but it's alright as long as they have a Sunfluff partner to hold their hand just in case!

Warp Pads

This is a Warp Pad! They appear sometimes after a shooting star crashes into the ground, like Trinkets. Fluffs and Floofs can use them to quickly jump to other Warp Pads, usually to travel between the sky and the surface. Each one only sticks around for a few weeks until its magic fades, so use it while you can! And if you live in the sky, make sure you warp back up there before the day ends, or that might be the night it decides to turn off...

Toads!

Check out these toads! They come in all sorts of sizes, colors, and patterns, so no two are exactly alike. They're also very, very hungry, and they'll steal any berry that's anywhere close to them. If there's another critter nearby that you wanna feed, you'll have to keep throwing berries until some of them get through!

But, we don't have a name for them yet. Leave your suggestions in the comments!

Oranges

Here's a quick preview of one of Cleru's alternate fruits, the orange! Nobody will eat it with the peel still on, so you need to slam it against the ground to split it into slices. It's hard to reach flying critters with it, but it's twice as tasty as strawberries!

You start with 3 fruits: strawberries (well-rounded), grapes (rapid-fire but weak), and oranges (hard to use but powerful). You never have to change which fruit you're using, but it's fun to mess around with!

Cleru takes a break to write stuff down!

Every once in a while, there's a really comfy spot to sit down at. Cleru will write about everything that's happened in their journal, including any people or critters you've taken pictures of! This will be your quest log and database, with the entire pause menu being entirely in-world as Cleru's journal. This system isn't quite done yet, but we'll keep you updated as we work on it!

Moonfloofs in the garden!

Here's our progress on the sheep town so far! This will be one of the first towns you visit, so you can ask for help or just talk to some cute sheeps.

Moonfloofs are usually nocturnal but you can still find some of them hanging out during the daytime. Each one has a different sky pattern on their wool, and it lights up at night to help them see!

Asking Questions

We just finished making the entire clock tower area for Sunfluffs! It's near the start of the game, and is the first major "dungeon". It took way, way longer than we thought, with a lot of that time being spent decorating it. This is the first time I've had to decorate a full 3D level, so I learned a lot, and it'll be some good article material!

For this specific topic, I had a bunch of examples prepared, but explaining just one of them already took a lot of space, so I might make a followup later.

So, I'll be talking about the room near the start of the gif, with the bridge and the spider. Here's what it looked like in the "block-out" (the version of the level that only has functional bits, and no extra graphic detail, to make it easier to iterate on it).

The pool of water on the right side acts as a soft penalty for failing the jump, since it's a bit inconvenient to jump out of water, so you won't be able to make it past the gate before it closes. (This is where a normal game would probably put spikes, but this is friendlier!) The water's important to the gameplay, but... why is it there, flavor-wise?

Well, there's a big pool of water on the next floor below, so that part lined up pretty well! It can be a trough with water that's flowing to the right, with a waterfall spilling out the end into the lower pool. But now the trough's water needs to be coming from somewhere, so I added another pool of water to the left of it, with a wooden bridge to keep it being solid gameplay-wise. All of these are assets that were already made, so it's just a matter of figuring out which tiles to use where.

This already looks much, much more interesting, even before any background elements are added. This already feels natural enough that I could add a regular background here and it'd be fine, but I asked "where is the water coming from?" one more time, just to see if it'd lead to any more ideas... and it did! Here's the finished version of the room, with a trough in the background that's the source of this whole flow:

So... does it really matter if every pool of water can be traced back to a source? Of course not! If this was decorated "normally", there wouldn't be any players who see the contextless pool of water below the gear platform and say "this looks out of place, where's it coming from?" But if the designer asks that question, it can lead to WAY cooler solutions than if they didn't! This goes for everything, including graphics, gameplay mechanics, or story. Take a bit of time to ask those questions and see if it leads you anywhere cool!

Links:

• entanma.com, our main site
• @AzureLazuline on twitter
• Discord chat room

LEG

These blocks worked fine last time I tried them, but I loaded it up today and it's like this now I guess! There doesn't seem to be any limit to how far you can stretch, either...

3D model deformation bugs have always been fascinating to me, and I've gone through a lot of them when making Sunfluffs. This is definitely the funniest one though!

Spicy birb toasts strawberries before eating them

We were trying to figure out a way to make sure that this critter does its fire attack at least once before you pacify it, and we came up with this! Sometimes game design needs end up leading to really flavorful solutions like this. Once it's pacified, you can direct it to use the fire attack for puzzles, so it's important for players to see that attack beforehand.

Since this one only eats toasted fruit, and the regular non-spicy birb only eats non-toasted fruit, it's actually a bit of a challenge to fight both types at the same time!

Into the background!

There's some parts of each level where you can go into the background. It's a fun way to solve some layout issues, AND it leads to super cool camera angles! This mechanic will be especially cool for making towns, so it doesn't have to be just one big horizontal plane.

This is the first post on my (Azure's) new computer, by the way! I finally got an upgrade after like 5 years, and Sunfluffs runs at 60fps in this level for the first time instead of 15. All the other gifs were recorded in slow-mo and then sped up. All the levels are made from a bunch of individual blocks, which means the level editor's REALLY nice and versatile, but it does mean the poly count's a lot higher than you'd expect...

Clock Tower climb

We're about halfway done decorating the clock tower! Filling out a single room like this takes 30-60 minutes, and there's about 20 rooms. It's a bit hard to get used to full tilebased 3D decorating, after Copy Kitty which used algorithmic placement for all background objects so you just hit "randomize" until it looks good. It feels really nice to have every single object and platform be connected to everything else though, since it makes it all feel like a real thing you can reach out and touch!

Rotating platforms!

This is the last mechanism I needed to make for the clock tower. It's a classic video game trope but I don't know any other games that made it as a physical construction! I found this diagram from 1868 detailing how to build one so I thought it'd be a cool addition. This type of mechanism is used as a water paddle, so each part cuts into the water vertically but then pushes with its broad side. Of course, when I saw this a few years ago, my first instinct was to rotate it 90 degrees and jump on it!

Source: http://507movements.com/mm_489.html 

Clock Tower block-out

Here's what levels look like before they're decorated. Keeping it extremely simple like this makes it easy to rearrange the sections or add new things, without needing to worry about making 10 background layers all line up! It also means if the level ends up too long and a part needs to be taken out, work spent on the background isn't wasted. This is called "blocking out" the level.

The layout of the clock tower is basically done now, and it's just going through some testing! This is the first major "dungeon" of the game, and there's a dangerous boss right at the top...

I think I broke something

I wrote a script to optimize the block layout in memory so this area wouldn't lag as much, but I got this really awesome glitch instead! I'm surprised I could still navigate the level with all the moving and rotating platforms.

Thanks for your patience even when there hasn't been much exclusive content posted here! Should I upload all the gifs and images as I post them on twitter too, or would people be annoyed by seeing it in two places? I think most people here follow both of us on twitter already, but I think the tagging system on Patreon might make it easier to sort through them.