Friends!

Exciting news! We can see the light at the end of the tunnel! We wanted to talk to ya'll more about where we are going from here and why we are making the decisions we have. A tldr can be found below.

To begin, our boss is concepted, modeled, animated (mostly), and being scripted now! We also have finished our levels! We mostly just have paint to put on and scratches to buff out! We completed all of our BGM's save the credit scene, and will be implementing our SFX now that models, animations, and VFX have been completed. There is still some more scripts needed for our item buffs and moveset debuffs as well as the boss itself, but all other planned scripts are finished!

So let's talk about going forward:

First, we will be establishing a "soft" deadline. This has been planned from the start. As gamers ourselves, we too have been burned by the new release cycle of "release a bugged and broken game and patch it later" and agreed that V1.0 will be a complete experience upon submittal to the game jam. To realize this dream, we are creating a "soft" deadline of 8/3 where we will plan to have a mechanically and whole game cobbled together. The remainder of the time after will be spent in our "polishing" phase where we will begin to bugfix and polish our game to be sound and unified in it's themes. The idea is that the creation of new assets will cease at the soft deadline and we will only build upon or polish current assets.

Second, we will be submitting the game a couple hours before the MFGJ deadline. This is a little more straight forward. While these hours could be preciously spent with more development towards the game, we made this decision in order to address any compiling issues with wrapping the project up in time. 

Third, we will be streaming a live podcast on Twitch about our game after our submittal! We plan to release more details about this stream in the next dev blog so keep an eye out!

Dev Notes (tldr):

• Playable beta version of Samsara: Sword of Seasonal Sorrow by 8/3 (GMT -7:00) - may or may not be uploaded to itch.io.
• Live podcast announced 8/5 (GMT -7:00) - details in next Devlog.
• Boss enemy modeled, animated, and in-progress for scripting.
• Buffs and Debuffs in-progress for scripting.