Monthly Update #29 🦃

Happy Thanksgiving 🦃🥧 to all of you Sleepyheads out there that celebrate the holiday! If you’re reading this at the time of posting, it’s actually Black Friday, so good luck with any holiday shopping you might be doing today! I’m actually writing this update on Wednesday because I will be taking time off on Thursday and Friday, and the first two weeks of the month I was visiting family, but I still got to spend a lot of time just drawing assets for the game on my iPad, so I’ve got plenty of fun spoilers to share with you down below.

Timeline Update 🕰️

As per usual, I just wanna touch base on the timeline with everyone. As I mentioned above, I didn’t get to work on as much level design as I’d have liked this month, but I did get tons of assets finished up this month, so things are still coming together to have things in a good playable state at the end of the year.

As I mentioned last month: the goal is to get these things done by the end of the year so that at the start of 2025 we have a mostly fully playable game, minus the remaining bosses which still need to be completed. So I think we’re still on track to be able to start planning a release timeline early in 2025 and get going on proper playtesting and all of the other things we need to do to get the game wrapped up.

Custom Save File Loading 💾

A minor feature I added this month is the ability for dev builds (so this includes the builds that those of you with Early Builds Access 💾 have access to) to load in pre-loaded save files. What I’ve done with this is made a save file that lets you load directly into the 🔭Observatory🔭 to see the 🐕Pet Statues🐕 and ⭐Pet Constellations⭐. I haven’t shipped this build yet, but keep an eye on the Discord. I also shared screenshots of all the pets in the #sleepwalker-announcements channel if you don’t want to spoil yourself by playing the game early but would still like to see your animal friend in-game to confirm details.

I also added another save in there just for people to play around, which lets you start the game with every toy, every PJ, and every Little Buddy (but I should note that not every PJ works yet and Polter-Pal isn’t ready yet). So if you don’t mind completely spoiling all sorts of stuff, this lets you just play around and kinda break the game a bit by having toys you shouldn’t have yet.

So once there’s a new build out, please toy around with this feature to explore the Observatory a bit or competely break the game by toying around with all of the unlockables! 😄

Spoilers Abound ❗🙈❗

Okay, onto spoilery stuff. I’ve been working on lots of art assets this month. I finished up a lot of stuff for Nightlight City, so just wanted to show off how some of that is looking with some fun screenshots and videos.

💡Nightlight City💡

This domain is just about done, so I just wanted to show off some stuff that previously I had only shown with rough black and white sketches, complete placeholder art, or perhaps I just haven’t shown off at all. I know I showed the Toy Trains and Hydrants (different flavors of moving platforms effectively) previously, but here’s how they look with finalized assets and animations:

Nemo catching a ride on a toy train through Nightlight City.

The trains have just a touch of animation and some bubbles coming out of the engine now. They’re a lot of fun to ride around on, I can’t wait to see what y’all think of them when you play through here.

Nemo jumping on erupting hydrants to get over a hazard.

And here’s the finalized hydrants! I’m really happy with how they turned out. They’re pretty small (just 1 unit tile wide) so you’ll need to be precise when jumping from one to another!

Something else we wanted to be able to do in Nightlight City is have a few different “flavors” of areas. We typically achieve this in other domains by simply adjusting the lighting, but these areas needed a few extra touches.

Nemo heading indoors in Nightlight City.

Here you can see the transition into an indoor area of Nightlight City. The interiors have their own decorations and windows as well as different lighting to help them feel like their own spaces. You’ll head into and back out of buildings as you make your way through this domain.

The sewers of Nightlight City. These background decorations are still being finalized, but weren’t done in time for this post.

In some areas of this domain, you’ll also head down below the city into the sewers. We’re still finishing up the decorations and lighting (for now I’ve just put João’s black and white sketches in directly), but you can see the “muck” from the Mushroom Marsh domain makes a return here as “sewer gunk”. Gross. 🤢 Don’t worrythough, it won’t turn you into a bipedal turtle or anything, it’ll just slow you down and hamper jumping.

Nemo meets Silas, aka the Professor

And finally I just wanted to show off the finalized sprites for Silas. I’ve talked a bit about him in previous updates, but previously I’ve only shown concept art and his dialogue portrait. You can see he uses his glove to control some of his contraptions.

✨Crystal Caverns✨

I’m also in the process of finalizing the assets for the Crystal Caverns domain. It’s not quite done, but I think the midground environmental details are turning out nicely so far, so I wanted to share some of this even though a lot of the art is still just in black and white sketch mode.

A peek at the Crystal Caverns with some art still in black and white.

Here you can get a better sense of what this domain is like. Very cavernous with evidence of previous attempts at mining the area. I’m very happy with how the main collision tiles for this domain turned out. I’m leveraging my default shader’s ability to add a fake specular sheen to things, which also helps the surfaces stand out in the darker parts of the Caverns.

A closer look at just the main tiles of Crystal Caverns.

Here’s a closer look at just those tiles so you can see them a little better. They were very inspired by the underground/cavern floor tiles of Yoshi’s Island, which I’ve always loved. I wanted the cragginess and gem-like qualities, while maintaining the very clear and distinct outlines of the collidable parts of the tile grid.

I worked on other sprites as well this month, for instance, Captain Sweetbeard’s sprite is all finalized now (when I get a new build up, you can look for him in the Dreamswept Plains), but I think that’s enough to show off for this month.

Back to Spoiler-Free ✅🐵✅

That’s it for this month! 👋

We’re heading into the last month of the year next week. It’s going to be a big one as I continue powering through finalizing the remaining assets and level design needed. I really appreciate all of you that read through these and follow along with development. So if you got all the way down here, thanks so much! Until next month, I hope to see you in the Discord. 😁

-Dave