Less Miserables DevLog Jan 26
Happy New Year!
OK, I know it's not January any more. But we did do a video devlog!
But who wants to watch my face for 8 minutes? I certainly don't!
So what did we do in January?
Well, we launched our first teaser trailer, which has racked up nearly 1k views in the first month!
We also exhibited our game for the first time! I'd done this for 4 events for The Protagonish, but that was nearly 2 years ago! So Pocket Gamer Connect in London was the first time showing it to people outside the pub, and I was super happy with how it went. It's a tricky kind of game to showcase at busy noisy events, where there are like 40 other games for people to play. But the artwork really drew people in, and I brought along a 22" 'portable' monitor which was great, because playing this game on a little laptop monitor doesn't do it justice. It was just a cheap £150 one, but ran entirely off one USB-C cable, so worked really well, especially when you get limited power points at these things.
And the feedback for the demo was really good! It takes most people about 15 minutes to play through, and about 50 people sat down to play, and amazingly about 90% of people played all the way through! For such a noisy event, and for a 'talky' narrative game, I'm super happy with this, and it vindicated that the length for this section and the difficulty level was just right. We've also got into 4 other events in the next 3 months! We are so lucky to be accepted to so many events in the run-up to the Kickstarter, it's just perfect timing for us to spread the word. At least to the UK...
We actually managed to fit in a recording session 4 days before the event, so we finally have recorded Clammy's lines for Act 1! She's our Cosette equivalent, and played by Morrigan, an amazing local young actress (doing her first VO role!). There's a sneak peak here with some of the lines and unpolished animation:
We've got one more VO session to do for Act 1 and the demo, which we aim to have out in March.
But we are already very busy with Act 2! This is the main bit (like 70% of the game) and is all set in PARIS!!! And it's coming together so fast - we'd story-boarded it all out about a year ago, but going from this:
To this
Has been relatively easy for Lucy, because we can draw so much from our photos from the Paris trip!
This is Lucy drawing over one of the photos from our trip: we spent ages talking about the right angle and shot for things like this, and it paid off! Because we've got so many photo references that are just perfect, and they show all the bits we need for puzzles and the perspective is right. We've got about 20 different locations in Act 2, and they are coming together really fast because we've been able to do so much planning before-hand.
We've also got 3 characters developed (but many more to come), including the baker, who is a major character and strongly influenced by Rene from the hit 80s British sitcom 'Allo 'Allo...
But we've also been working on the graphic design for the 'Heads Off!' card game! A top-trumps with a twist game, that you can play in the game, but also will have a physical edition in our Kickstarter!
We've also made mockups of the Big Box edition that you can get in the Kickstarter, a proper video game box, with the game released as a DVD-talkie! We are trying to get some of the vibe of the Curse of Monkey Island / Day of the Tentacle CD-ROM talkie circa 1997, so a physical box is an essential edition to any adventure game collector's shelf:
These are just basic laser-printer prototypes, but we have suppliers lined up so we can get proper 2-part boxes, playing cards and DVDs in cases all made in the UK. So register your interest for our Kickstarter here! There's no obligation, but you'll get to be first in line for the limited edition lovely things:
And please spread the word! Know someone who might be interested? Let them know! You can also sign up here for more info, or follow us on Mastodon or BlueSky!
