Hello fine people, hope you had a great break. We sure did. Although the year is young, we've made some good progress so far. One of the most exciting and incredibly motivating events to happen was our teaser on TikTok blowing up. Over the break, we amassed over 1 Million views and 185K likes!
Even though it's a bit off-topic, this is a huge win. As an Indie studio with very limited advertising spend, getting the word out on Macabre is our greatest challenge. We've been incredibly humbled by all of the love and support, and we welcome all of our new followers! Now, let's get into the game.
Development
We've recently implemented a development version of Epic Online services in our test environment. Now anyone can jump into a session and explore the map together.
We've begun work on our monster AI with basic senses of sight and hearing. Over time we'll build out its behavioural tree with many randomised behaviours of varying intensity to bring our creature to life and keep the player guessing.
We've also started implementing our monsters animation graph. Soon we'll have our friendly little guy running around in the environment with wonderfully creepy animations. Speaking of...
Animation
We've continued to work on our main creature animations. There's a huge list to get through, but it will ensure it has a robust animation set, allowing for more nuanced movement and interactions to really bring our creature to life.
Game and Level Design
We've been building out a staging environment to test our core mechanics. This includes player items, core game mechanics and interactions. This way, we can play with parameters and dial-in functionality before implementing it into the main game.
Concept and Art
Plenty more concept art has been worked on, mainly some interesting collectables players will need to progress through the game. These are currently being built out in 3D.
We've also put together some more environmental concept art to guide the direction of the set dressing of the buildings and environemnt.
Cinematics
Last week we recorded some test mocap scenes for the trailer, which worked out brilliantly. Some cleanup needs to be done, but overall, we're pretty happy with the result. More to come!
Introducing Banjo
Banjo is our lead protagonist. He'll guide players through the world and deliver key narrative beats. Players will assist Banjo in various quests in order to progress. It took some searching, but we finally found someone who could convey Banjo's peculiar character. We recently recorded our first VO session. We hope you love the results as much as we do! Here's a little snippet of what we captured.
Until next time.
Team Macabre.