Monthly Update #23 ⛅

Welcome back for another monthly update, Sleepyheads. With May coming to a close, we’re fast approaching the two-year mark since the Kickstarter. Although we’re over the initial estimate, I’m really excited with how things are coming together now. This month I’ve been working on finishing up all of the Little Buddies, getting the world laid out such that you can navigate through the entire thing, and getting a bunch of enemies built. The enemies I just finished designing and implementing for the 🎃Haunted Hollow🎃 don’t have art yet, so I’m not going to share anything about them this month.

So for this month what I thought I’d show off is a look at all of the Little Buddies in the game. I just finished up the overhaul they needed so that they can better follow along with Nemo and most of them are completely ready. I also wanted to show off a bit of what João has been working on this month: art for set pieces. Currently when you’ve found NPCs in the game, they have just been plopped into the world without any supporting art around them, but the goal is to have more art prefabs decorating the world, especially with our NPCs.

So if you don’t want to see any of that, skip down to the spoiler-end tag!

Spoilers Abound ❗🙈❗

Little Buddies 🧸

Since the Little Buddies are just about all done, I thought I’d share details about all of them. Some of them you’ve probably seen before, or maybe you’ve even found one in the current build of the game. I’ll be detailing what ability each Buddy provides, as well as a rough idea of where you can find each one. If you don’t want the fine details, I recommend just skimming over and taking a peek at the images.

My Alien Monster 👹

I’ve shared a bit about the progress of this one in recent updates, but he’s all done now. This is likely the first Little Buddy you’ll pick-up and is found in 🍭Gumdrop Gardens🍭. You can carry him around, and when you do, he’ll eat up any enemies in front of you. But you won’t get any moons from enemies you eat this way, and some enemies will get spat back out if he doesn’t like how they taste.

My Alien Monster eating a Ramblecap

Status: ✅ All set, and you can even find this Little Buddy in the current build of the game.

Lampet the Glo-Snail 🐌

This is another Little Buddy who you can carry around, but it won’t help you in combat. Instead Lampet provides a natural bioluminescent glow that will help you navigate the darker areas of the game. Though you’ll find this Buddy in 🍄Mushroom Marsh🍄, that’s not the only domain that will have dark areas that are difficult to navigate. Select this Buddy if you don’t like being caught out in the dark, but you’ll have to find it first…

Lampet will give you the option of seeing your surroundings and can even be carried around if needed

Status: ✅ All set, but not yet available in the current build.

Polter-Pal 👻

If you make your way into the 🎃Haunted Hollow🎃, you may be able to find this Little Buddy. This buddy is great if you need a little help fighting the monsters in Slumberland because it can scare whichever monster is closest to Nemo, freezing it in place, and preventing it from hurting you.

João’s concept sketches for Polter-Pal

Polter-Pal is a bit different than the other buddies. Being a ghost, they can just float around and go through walls, so they don’t take advantage of the pathfinding the other Buddies use.

My initial animation sketches for Polter-Pal based on the above concepts

Status: ⬜ This is the last buddy left to finish up! Animations are sketched in, but I still need to finish them up and implement the enemy scaring mechanic.

Panda Tuxpin 🐼

Now if you want to dig into the lore of Slumberland, this is the Buddy you’ll want to keep by your side. Throughout Slumberland, you’ll find small statues with some kind of embedded record in them, and Panda Tuxpin is able to read them to you. I’m not going to share where this Buddy is, and he’ll be well hidden.

Panda Tuxpin will head towards a Lore Record when you get close to one. He’s the only Little Buddy that will talk to you!

Status: ✅ Mostly all set, but I still have some sprites to color as you can tell from this video.

B.O.B 🤖

If you manage to get to Silas in Nightlight City and help him with his request to get photos of the giant Dinosaur running around 💡Nightlight City💡, then he’ll have another request: salvage some spare parts that are scattered around the city. If you can collect them and bring them back to Silas, he’ll be able to use them to build you a Little Buddy. And this Little Buddy will be able to alert you to any of the secret tunnels that Silas has found (or even made) throughout Slumberland. If you’re trying to find all of the secrets of Slumberland, this Buddy is a must-have.

B.O.B. alerting Nemo to the presence of a nearby secret

Status: ✅ All set, and you can find it in the current build, although later it will move from its current hiding place.

Set Pieces 🖼️

Getting João on board to help with art has helped in a number of ways, but one of the things I’ve been wanting to do, but simply didn’t have the time for previously, was to have more set-dressing in the world. Some of it will be domain-specific details we can just arbitrarily decorate throughout a zone, and some of them should be single-use, unique pieces of art to help make a particular part of the world stand out and be memorable, what I refer to as set pieces.

João has been working this past month on making set pieces designed to accompany some of our NPCs, and I just wanted to share some of these so you can see what a great job he’s done creating these in a style that matches the existing art, while adding much more detail and fun than was there before.

A Mysterious NPC in the Mushroom Marsh 🍄

I don’t want to spoil anything about this character, as they have a bit of mystery about them and in-fact might be a bit difficult to even find in the game. So I’m just gonna show you their house and leave it at that.

A house nestled into a far corner of the Marsh

This was a fun way for the two of us to work together on this one. João made a static art asset, and then I did a second pass making a masking layer that tells the sprite where emissive lights should be and what parts of the sprite can move a bit in the wind and when things pass by.

Captain Sweetbeard’s Pirate Ship Treehouse 🍭

I believe I may have already described this character a bit in the past, but perhaps not in detail. Captain Sweetbeard is a character you can expect to encounter fairly early in the game in the 💨Dreamswept Plains💨. He provides an interesting little “service” for you and when you are woken up, he will actually collect all of the candy that you dropped in Slumberland. After taking a reasonable service fee, he’ll hold onto your candy for you until you’re ready to claim it.

You’ll always be able to find Captain Sweetbeard here in his Pirate Ship Treehouse if you need to collect some of the candy you dropped. If you plan to take out some candy to bring somewhere to spend, be careful of waking up while carrying that candy around because he’ll take his cut again if he has to go pick it up for you!

Minerva’s House 🦉

One of the nice things about adding this kind of art into the game, is it helps round out the characters and gives little touches of lore that are fun and just make the world more rewarding to explore. For instance, did you know that Minerva is an avid bug collector?

Here is Minerva’s house where you can see some evidence of her hobby decorating the wall. When I was very young, one of my favorite things was getting up early on Saturday mornings to watch The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and I really love how this expresses just a touch of that influence. As with the Mushroom House I showed above, I will do a masking layer pass on this as well so that the leaves and hanging fabrics can gently move in the wind to help this come to life just a bit more.

Silas’ Workshop 🔨

I mentioned Silas above when talking about B.O.B., and here is his workshop. I’m just showing João’s static sketch here, but you can expect it to come to life a bit more with a glowing and changing arcade monitor and lights and objects that will add some dynamism to the whole scene.

Someone’s Building a House 🍬

I don’t want to spoil too much here, but soon you’ll find some sort of under-construction zone in 🍭Gumdrop Gardens🍭. Someone must be building something here. Perhaps we can find whoever is responsible and help them out!

This is already looking pretty nice, but it’s still under construction. Who knows how grand this building might get when it’s fully completed?!

There are plenty more set pieces to come, but I hope this gives you an idea of the fun little details we want to sprinkle into the world to make it more fun and exciting.

Back to Spoiler-Free ✅🐵✅

Timeline Update 🕰️

With João handling a lot of the static art assets we still have left to complete, I’m right now focused primarily on the three major things that need to get wrapped up: 1) level/world design that remains, 2) enemy and boss implementations that remain, and 3) environment design for the last two domains. There will still be a lot of enemy animations to do, but typically enemies don’t have too many frames of animation and I’ve been getting João’s help both with getting the visual concepts nailed down for each one as well as sketching in some of the line-art for some of them. The thing that is the most daunting right now is making sure the bosses that are left to implement are fun, and getting that stuff right takes an amount of time that is really hard to quantify.

So as I mentioned before, we’re not gonna hit my more aggressive goal of getting these things done by early summer, but we’ll see how we’re doing towards the end of summer and hopefully we’ll be in a better place that I can start planning around target dates (though I won’t share those until I’m a little more sure of them).

That’s it for this month! 👋

As always, thank you so much for reading through and following along with our development. Make sure to check out the Discord if you want to chat directly and share feedback, or just leave a message in the comments down below. Thank you, Sleepyheads, and we’ll see you next month!

-Dave