Apr 2, 2022
OneShot: Aftermath - ❤eternenty❤
Hello everyone! We're back!
Seven months is admittedly a bit longer than we'd like, but it does give us quite a bit to share to make up for it (even through some setbacks)! We'd rather not waste further time, so let's get into it! We'll be splitting this into multiple sections (so forgive us for possible clutter), and to get some of the fun stuff up front and not bore you with technical mumbo jumbo, we have lots of fun graphical stuff to share, being sprites and non-spoiler CGs!
Fun art Stuff!
In the last devlog we touched on some Glen resprites being in the works, and since then we've had almost all of them done to completion (only a few missing now)! Here's some notable examples:
Some of the sprites left are a couple of generic NPC sprites, and other special scenario sprites like the Moxie and Nevermore sitting animation that was in the previous release of the mod on Gamejolt.
Of which, for special sprites we have a few ones now used in game (WIP of course):
(Niko receiving a polaroid at dinner from Teridae)
(also new dinner scene sitting sprites!)
(Niko cryring; no we are not disclosing the use case)
Of the Glen overworld sprites, all that's remaining to be worked on is the last few generic NPC sprites and the Moxie and Nevermore battery sprite.
More exciting than just these character changes however, is the new landmarks and fullscreen CG's that have been worked on.
(some of these are still concept sketches)
(big elder tree in the sprout village (yet to be named anything else))
(Ram Village decorations)
(entering the Glen CG)
(exiting the barrens sequence)
(Sea-Faster© Vending Machine)
(some of the Barrens scientists facesprites (still a few more left))
(Ed's Challenge resprite!)
Footer note here: There's definitely a lot more that we'd love to share but are planning on keeping to our Patreon/actual release of the game
Progression/Other Tweaks
Taking notes from our previous endeavors with releases, our friend's works and community feedback/personal observations. we've been working away at changing little things about to game to help with story flow, direction, and overall enjoyment (we hope!)One of the big things that people had an issue with in the past was navigation around locations and getting lost. A huge thing we've tried doing was landmarks for the two villages and other places.
Other small things are adding signs around, bells at the ram village bridges, and boxes on the docks bridge. Over all trying to add dynamic context clues of your were-abouts that doesn't attempt to hold your hand by shoving a big ol' map in your face (that wouldn't be very OneShot now would it!)
Outside of navigational tweaks, sections of the game have been reworked slightly in the progression to help better tell the story and also provide more reason to actually take in any of the world.
One of the small changes was moving Teridae to be with the Children of the Ruins to give more context to Teridae's lack of "Stranger Danger!" to Niko later in the Glen. Related, also redoing the entire southern Barrens to be less of a fetch Silver and dip scenario, we've added a few more small puzzles there that let you get to know The Science Team™ that Eternabyte happens to like a little too much (the amount of lore they have that we're not even sure will make the full game cut of anything is funny). It's nothing we feel elongates the play time by too much at all, but does provide a better experience outside of having a static art gallery display of fun scientist animations.
Technical Graphics and Game tweaks
Outside of the normal art stuff, we've also been adding more technical sided graphical things. A few tiny examples would be the water/fog effects.
(this can be turned off in settings if you feel its too much of a departure from even our artstyle)
You might of also noticed a inconsistency in some previous screenshots, this is because the fox has been a bit dumb and messed around with the other new feature (the brightness slider!).
This has been added to help darker or even lighter displays show the game better, though tweaking the base light of our maps and what your screen should see has been a pain and not quite touched yet.
(please excuse the gif compression)
There's a few other things that could be touched on; Screen effects being added for certain small use cases, and text effect work. But these we feel would be better to leave to actual in game execution to demonstrate.
(and yes these are also both toggleable to help those who might have issues processing text or who even might have an issue with the screen effects. no we aren't flashing bright colours in your face rapidly lol)
Development Ramble
Not quite our closing thoughts yet, however a fun little teeny tiny section we'd like to put in, in place of our Dev Shenanigans (we don't really have any this time :<) is just a little bit of rambling about the release, and what we have left to do.Over all we're getting rather close to the release here, though I guess a quick clarification we wanna make one more time; the steam release coming soon is still not our final game and once more just a quick re-hash of the previous Gamejolt demo with the new quality standard and development style we swapped to a while back (the fox still has anxiety people will mistake it for a finished story and full experience!).
The other little bit I wanted to slam in here was just a quick note of what is left to be finished before we make our steps to some playtesting and then our steam release.
- Dialogue Engine needs to have it's bugs quickly fixed
- Dialogue needs to be finished being rewritten, mostly small things in the Glen and the ending of the Barrens
- BLIP! has some stuff going on in her section we didn't share that needs some eventing left
- Ram Village decoration sprites
- Achievement Icons
- Finishing up the fullscreen CG's we showed above
- The last ... 4.. 5 ish NPC sprites in the Glen
- The little bit left in the Southern Barrens puzzle (functionality wise and its little dialogue peices left)
- Padding out the brightness of the maps
- ED's Challenge (renamed to Blips Challenge btw)
- Bird Children need to have some events done for them chilling outside after their puzzles
Reading on it, this list does look quite long. Though taking in the fine details of how long certain things here are it's genuinely not that much. The big things here that hammer in a slowness do boil down to art, and I guess that dialogue engine (it's kicking fox in the butt)
Seriously lots of love out to Maeve Raeve and Hazel on our team for the massive amount of art they've been doing for OSAM.
... Speaking.. Would you look at the time haha, I've overstayed my ramble.
Regarding The Radio Silence
Now, with the devlog out of the way, we'd like to apologize for the radio silence (and in turn, thank all of you who stayed patient with us), because as mentioned, seven months is too long. Due to this, we feel obligated to be as transparent as we can about our situation, as doing something like that to any community is borderline unacceptable. Feel free to skip this section if you're uninterested.To put it bluntly, the team went on a silent hiatus due to a mix of heavy decline in mental health, development burnout, and issues in our personal lives (many of which we'd rather not state due to privacy) that directly effected the ability for us to even have the chance to work on OSAM. It doesn't help that we live across the world (most of us live in the US currently, however one of us is moving, two of us are in Canada, and another in Brazil), have tight schedules outside of development, and are working with subpar hardware (to the extent that one of our two artists are without a drawing tablet, and the other's PC is and has been highly dysfunctional). With that reason we recently released a Patreon page for WIPs and early access of music, art, and even playtest builds of the game when they're ready!
We made sure to keep it at a low price as well, as we want that content to be easily available. We don't want to gatekeep that kind of content from our community, or anyone who wants to see it for that matter.
Thank you all for sticking with us through this, and we hope to see you all again very soon! VERY soon :D
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