Devlog #9: A Little Bit of Polish posted in Sword and Quill Devlog Published May 26, 2025 Advertisement Hi, wonderful humans! It's time for another devlog.The Creature Collector Fest is over but the Next Fest is right around the corner! Juggling priorities gets harder and harder between improving the demo, working on the main game, making sure the Twitch integration works, adding Animons, capturing fixing wild bugs, marketing. I'm trying to use Codecks more consistently which definitely helps. Did you know I have an open board? You can check what I'm working on or what I have planned and even up-vote features you like to see most. You can find it here.With another upcoming event, the Access-Ability showcase, I've been prioritizing accessibility features like optimizing the UI for scaling to reduce cases where elements get pushed out of the screen. Next, I'm trying to tackle adding more options for photosensitivity. You can already disable screenshake but there's currently no option for reducing flashing lights. Time for PolishWith a little bit of time opening up, I managed to dedicate some of it to polish which felt incredibly good after weeks of very technical tasks. I improved the win screen that shows when you beat either the demo or the alpha and added animations to it (loving Tweens y'all!). Honestly, the win screen was all over the place before that with elements overlapping each other, text being cut off, and more abominations. Oof...At the end of last week,  I started working on preventing the UI getting pushed around when you or the enemy had too many dice. I added dynamic spacing between the dice that takes the amount and the width of the container into account and added a nice bouncy hover effect to make it easier to see when they are close together. Again, using Tweens, I scale the node up and down accordingly with the "elastic" curve for that nice swing effect at the end.I hope to find time to add more battle effects to tricks which are also in need of a lot of polish. Many attacks just reuse the tackle or jump attack effect but they deserve their own little identity. This might lead to refactoring the entire battle effect system which I implemented a while ago before I learned how to write better code. I'm currently creating a scene for each effect with the battle effect resource which has a drop-down for all sorts of effect types like animation, tween, particles, and so on. I can assign a target control and tell it what to do from self-defined presets, if the effect should target the player or opponent, and so on. I probably want to rework it to be similar to how I create tricks now, where I can add trick features as a sub-resource indefinitely to customize it however I want because – like with the old tricks – I cannot combine effects like tween and particles with the current battle effect system.A few smaller tweaks are the run menu on the map collapsing when not needed and the starter selection screen which now shows the Animon's quirk when hovering/focusing on it.Roadmap(?)Planning the next months is bleh (I hate planning!) but it's gotta be done. I already moved some feature back into the early access period to make sure I get the base game loop solid and working before that. Currently, I'm eyeing end of July for early access which is after the Summer Sale but before the gamescom. Until then, I want all three regions to have roughly the same amount of Animons and the difficulty curve more or less balanced (and of course zero bugs and full optimization which is a reasonable and realistic expectation). There's also a story-cinematic I have planned as an intro to give you a little bit of narrative context but we'll see if I get around drawing all that.A few features I have planned for the ea period are:Soulblaze mechanic: We all want it, we all love it: Evolution, transformation, digitize, super sayjan form, and what not. Soulblaze forms have been on the list since the beginning but I didn't want to add it until I was sure I have settled on the dice mechanics because they will be a big part of triggering it.Nuzlocke-mode: Adding the popular self-imposed difficulty challenge from Pokémon to the game. If you don't know it, it means that if one of your creatures gets defeated, you have to release it and you get to only capture one creature per region. The mode would take care of these restrictions for you, of course.  Co-op mode: I love co-op and there's not nearly enough games with it. Since Soulblaze is turn-based, it's possible to insert a 2-player mode but I'd have to figure out how to handle displaying 2 Animons per side and how to handle turns then. Do the player both plan their turn and they play out together or do they go one after the other? Maybe alternating with the enemy? Will think about this.Unlockable comic pages: Story is always important to me and I literally can't create a game without having a story in mind. While Soulblaze might be my least story-focused game so far, I still want it to contain lore and especially character stories. In that regard, I want players to be able to unlock comic pages while they play which they can read in the collection and don't worry, I'll add visual descriptions to those as well, of course!Keep in mind that those are features I wish to implement and not guaranteed (well, except for Soulblaze forms which... kinda have to be in there, y'know?). I don't know if I will have the time to implement all of these or that I don't run into serious technical issues that I can't solve. Solo dev means that your time is so split between everything that every mid to large hurdle can mean it has to be put on hold indefinitely. But I'll do my best and it also helps that I really, really want those features.Lore Sneak-PeekOver a decade ago the Observer arrived on Earth, a huge crystalline lifeform that appeared to be peaceful. A few years later, for unknown reasons, it shattered and fragments of it grew to became the Animons we know today. Bindshards are made from the outer shell of the Observer and are used to capture Animons because they naturally want to return to their original form, therefore binding easily with the material of the Observer.When exactly the Soulblaze was discovered is unclear but the first Animancers experienced alteration of the Animons' physical shape when they got really excited, scared, or angry. It happens when the soul literally ignites in a surge of energy. Humans, as they do, saw the power and tried to trigger the Soulblaze within themselves which did not go so great...  the results are, well, you have met some of the bosses, haven't you...? Previous Entry Accessibility in Games - Where do I start? Comments You must log in to join the conversation. Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!