I haven't posted anything in a very long time. We are hard at work, creating a new and better demo for Behind the Beyond. Here is why all of this is happening and why it's going to be super cool.

You may remember that throughout last year we gathered a lot of feedback from various people about the game. Some people were veteran point click players, others had no idea about the genre. While we know that it is impossible to please everyone, we want to make a game that fun and enjoyable for as many people as possible. So we have to make some changes (don't worry, half the changes are already done, we are NOT doing the whole thing from scratch). The one thing that each and every person included in their feedback in some way, was that our visuals could be better. And we agree. Although a lot has changed since the game jam, our demo still looks.... mmm... ok... But we are not satisfied with "ok". We want "great". And you deserve a great game!

In the meantime, a lot has been going on in past few months in our household(s). As we are a small team, a lot is riding on one person's time and efforts to make this a great game. This year there were some major changes in the team. I had a baby (yay!), so obviously I can't spend as much time in front of my screen as before. But! Vikus is now an almost full-time team member, so things have really sped up in the art department. Even though our other artist Chris left the team. The lesson learned here is that the only way you are going forward is if you dedicate yourself to what you are working on. No side projects, no detours, no hobbyists. Because if anyone in the team has anything more important to do, you will end up waiting for them forever. And it's unfair to both of you.

Let's take a quick look at what we've been up to since the last blog post!

We are in the middle of updating our UI. So far we've only updated the look and feel of the inventory and the pause menu. Why did we do that? The old inventory and pause menu looked out of place and not integrating very well with how the rest of the game looks. So first of all, we changed the graphics of the inventory to be more like something from within the game, rather than a UI element, while we integrated the wearable items panel into it too.

We made a whole lot of changes in the village scenery too. We've updated some of the graphics, and added much much more detail and just a tad more life to every corner of this scene. I will go into more detail about these changes in a later post. For now, just take a look at the before and after screenshots of the village scene below!

As for the pause menu... The old pause menu was just a simple popup. We thought that instead of having this tiny thing in the middle of the screen, why not make this look spectacular and show off with a taste of Hungarian embroidery? Btw this is also how we treated all of the flowers that we added to the village. Our flowers look halfway between a real flower and an embroidery motif. We didn't stick to one specific set, instead we invented sort of our own style, but it is heavily influenced by different Hungarian embroidery styles such as kalocsai, matyó and kalotaszegi.

And of course, don't forget about the characters! You might have seen some samples already, but we are still neck deep in updating and improving on all the animations for our characters and it's gonna be so good! Vikus and I are giving it all to deliver the cutest, funniest and most authentic characters.

Stay tuned for the next progress report and until then, be careful on your adventures!