MORLEQUARIAT: The Final Chronicle of the House of Plifk

The vtuber Kaia Soule is streaming a playthrough of the latest Morlequariat demo right now! She's a variety streamer who personifies the idea of "contagious laughter" and she's been a big part of what inspired me to start streaming my development process, so stop by!

Can't very well call these weekly any more, given how often I forget to write them. But I should still post updates about the game when I have them!

I've been working lately on improving the game's opening cutscene, adding more variety in character animations and putting more personality in the wording. It's a lot closer to my original vision now, although there's always more improvements that can be made. This is now the first thing you see upon starting up a new save file:

I've also been making even more improvements to the tilesets, changing the old wall tiles to be more versatile and adding more decorative tiles for detailing and adding more texture to things.

Not entirely sure what the next release is going to be. Depending on what gets done and when, I might put out a new version just with these improvements this month, or I might wait until the Chapter 1 Mid-Boss fight is finished.

Doing a livestream on Twitch where I'm going over a "List of Console RPG Cliches" and answering general questions about the game's lore. Come say hi!

Alpha 4.2.3 is out today! That's it. That's the devlog.

Well, okay, I can say a few more things. Since the last update was a content-focused one, today's is more about polishing. So now there's things like attack animations and the ability to access the settings menu from the title screen.

With the new year starting, I'm going to try to get back into the habit of posting devlogs every monday.

Morlequariat is going slowly right now. There's various reasons for this: my job being a little more demanding, trying to buy a house, working on my other game (more on that later!), and general burnout. However, I'm going to try to get an update out this month that fixes a lot of bugs and replaces a lot of placeholder content, so that next month I can have the first major boss fight working. I am intentionally taking half a step back from Morlequariat right now, but I'm sure that soon enough I will get back into it.

Meanwhile, the other game I mentioned is still going strong. No word yet on how I want to title it, but I'm looking at putting an open beta on Itch in a few months and maybe even a full Steam release by the end of the year. Since it's not really narrative-focused, its precision-platforming challenges are much easier to design than Morlequariat's tactical combat encounters, and its overall scope is much smaller, it's proceeding very quickly compared to Morlequariat.

Well, I said it would release at the end of august, and I was wrong. But! It's out now!

This is primarily a content update, adding new areas all around the lake, up until (but not including) the first major plot-relevant boss fight.

(The structure of the game is that there will be four chapters, each with a major boss fight at the end and a major boss fight in the middle. So tonight's update ends with the pre-fight cutscene for the chapter 1 mid-boss.)

Been very busy lately, with my job and other real-life stuff but also with trying to rush out this update before the end of the month. Still not sure what day it will be, but any day now.

"Weekly" no longer means "at a regularly scheduled time that happens 24 x 7 hours apart". Instead, it means "I'll try to do one within every seven-day period but there's no guarantee which day it'll happen". It's a surprise! (By which I mean that I keep forgetting to do these until later in the week.)

Yesterday's devstream was mostly focused around improving some art assets and fixing bugs that were impacting one specific room. Apparently, if you used a push attack to push a character against the current of running water for multiple spaces at a time, each space they moved against the current would trigger a delayed push effect that would move them back downstream. However, once they got to the end of where they were being pushed, the current there would move them downstream again, so that they'd trigger the push effect of each water tile twice (both coming and going), resulting in them ending up significantly farther downstream than where they started.

In other words: I somehow managed to make an accurate simulation of how a spring works in a game that literally doesn't have physics.

Well, I keep forgetting to post the "monday" devlogs, so I guess this one will also double as the thursday livestream announcement. (Go check out EpiglottalAxolotl on twitch.tv! If I've scheduled this post correctly, I should be starting a development stream within a few minutes of it going live.)

Anyway, I haven't gotten anything done this week because Terraria updated.

That said, during last week's devstream I crossed off most or all of the remaining low-hanging fruit in terms of engine code and changes to existing rooms. So now all that's left to do before the Alpha.4.2.2 release is:

Fix some annoying deep-magic engine code that sometimes allows players to move around during a cutscene

Draw the interior tileset that will be used for caves full of puzzles

Draw overworld sprites for a couple new enemies and NPCs

Finish one new music track and three new sound effects

Map out approximately four new rooms, two of which need combat encounters

Draw inventory sprites for two new items

I think I'm finally closing in on 4.2.2 being ready to release, after the many months of not-getting-much-done since 4.2.1 came out. The tentative release date is this sunday (october 1), although there's a chance it'll take a few days more than that. I spent a lot of time this past weekend figuring out just what all needs to be done for the update, and while there's a lot of art assets I still need to make, I don't think that it's beyond the realm of possibility to finish everything this week. This week's thursday dev stream is probably going to run long, just like last week's did.

Making steady progress towards a 4.2.2 release. Still going a little slower than I thought (for example, I spent half of this past thursday's stream fixing bugs with the enemy script system), and there's a lot of bugs to be patched and content to be made, so there's a chance that the update will get pushed back to october (the original plan was to release it in late august).