December Updates!
Happy Halloween everybody! The nights are short, the trees are bare, that yearly chill is in the air. I feel like it's been Halloween for a rather long time now that I think about it, but I won't look a dead horse in the mouth, I suppose. It's still a season for giving, so I come bearing gifts! We've got a lot of updates as we creep closer to getting a demo of Trigger Treat ready to display. It ended up taking a bit longer than expected but we're working hard on getting everything we need so you can all sample the game soon. I've been busy with the arduous process of animation, DD has been stitching together all the parts of gameplay, and we even have some progress on the game's soundtrack for you to enjoy as a special tricky treat!
( This tractor is an enemy vehicle that will be seen in the first level of Trigger Treat! )
As I mentioned in the last post, we're in the midst of making obstacles to build our first level with. Here's one of the threats the player will face among other environmental hazards. Each level has some not-quite enemies to contend with in addition to mobile monsters, this modified tractor being one from our first level. Players may want to disable it as it poses danger to both themselves and NPCs, but it also has the potential to clear enemies as well! Strategy will be needed in order to navigate the chaos. Stages of damage are forthcoming, so look forward to seeing it in its intended context! Meanwhile, work continues on building one of the hostile monsters I started on previously which is starting to take recognizable shape.
( You can expect to see many of these guys swarming you in the first level - so be careful! )
The modular nature of this design is visible here, and in the coming weeks I'll be adding more body parts which can be swapped to give an impression of more variety in a crowd. These pumpkin-headed mooks will often be forming whole mobs, so mixing up their appearances will help liven up an otherwise repetitive scene. As the most basic of attackers in the game, they're relatively slow, but shamelessly wield deadly weapons nevertheless.
( Characters have their eyelids and pupils layered so that they can look around and blink! )
In addition to the ornamental features of the enemies mentioned above, we've also added some more details to help bring the player characters to life. Namely these blinking frames can be added to the existing character animations and incorporated alongside other features like roving pupils which should help sell the sentience of these fictional creatures. It's very important to us that the player form an emotional connection with every character in the game, and hopefully will make each gruesome demise or narrow escape all the more impactful!
~ Julian
(Grey outlines are used on characters for readability whenever they overlap the color black.)
We've both been working hard on putting together the demo for Trigger Treat, and while we'll still need some time to finish up a lot of art and animation for the first stage, the game's core is entirely setup and optimized and ready to go! Since it was going to take some time to get a lot of the art finalized, I spent the past couple of months ensuring the game could run smoothly regardless of PC and also granting a lot of options to the player - such as running the game at a higher framerate (thanks to interpolation) on monitors with higher refresh rates. We have systems also integrated into the game's core for future use, like a method for creating replay files (so players in the final game will be able to re-watch their playthroughs).
Trigger Treat can be very chaotic as a game sometimes (with thousands of particles and bullets going off simultaneously) so there was a strong emphasis towards utilizing any tricks possible to keep performance at a high even during those moments. The changes we've made to the game since its original conception have really opened things up creatively, and it has been exciting being able to work without as many limits/restrictions like we once had.
( Examples of many different alternate color schemes available to players in the game! )
The game utilizes color palettes for characters which allows for certain unique visual effects in-game, as well as the option for the player to choose alternate color schemes for their character. By default, players will only start with a few colors per character, but more can be unlocked by playing the game or completing specific tasks. Enemies and NPCs can also utilize alternate palettes, so there can be some variety between enemies that you fight as well as the various characters that you can rescue during your play-through.
( The TRAINING MODE in-game will grant access to some of our debug menu's options! )
It'll still take a little while here to finish up art assets for the game's first demo, but the game's core is entirely setup with all sorts of testing tools we can utilize to ensure things feel solid. Many of the options from our debug menu will be available to players in the final game via a training mode, so if you want to view hitboxes or put the game into slow motion to practice a level - these options will be open to players so that they can perfect their approach to stages. All these systems being setup ahead of time have really sped up development (as well as testing) so we're past the trickiest part with the game when it comes to the game's code. Our goal was to ensure this game would also be able to run on most machines (especially because console ports are always a possibility in the future) and now that it's optimized, we also have a lot of our code saved as templates for future use in our titles which will save a lot of time with development for ALL of our future game projects!
We have come a very long way from where we first started with Trigger Treat as a project, and thanks to little free games we made off to the side like Dominoid, we've been able to experiment and figure out a lot around optimizations and how to keep things concise and functional. While things ended up taking longer than we had expected, we are at least at a point now that implementing new content and features into the game takes very little time. The next couple of months are going to be needed for finishing this demo (as there's still a lot needing to be done visually) but it has been extremely exciting really seeing everything come to life and that we're this close to having things ready for play testing.
Thank you all again for continuing to show support after all this time! While things are taking a bit longer than we had hoped for getting this demo together, we have been dedicating our schedule and focus towards working on it daily to getting it all finalized. There will be much more to show next month as we get very close to the release of the demo. Similar to Dominoid, all silver & gold patrons will have a first look at the Trigger Treat demo before it goes public as a demo a month after that. Game development streams are still being done every Tuesday and Thursday on Twitch - so tune in if you want to keep up with development!
(This Patreon will also be changing a bit once we turn over into January, as we will be rebranding as simply WanWan alongside tidying up the frontpage to be more up to date with all the projects we have been working on and some new images for them as well.)
We hope you guys have a good December - and we'll see you all next year in 2026!
~ DD