Devlog #2 — Art Backstage + Lore + Devstuff

Update Notes
We’re very happy to have taken this first step towards releasing our game, and we’re already receiving a lot of thoughtful feedback. We even got our very first purchase! We are very grateful to you all and encouraged to keep improving and building
We’re already planning many changes and improvements, and we’ll use this space to share them with you.

What’s New

• Weapon abilities: we replaced placeholder indicators for some cool HUD animations to make it clearer when each weapon ability is ready to use. We found that it's still hard to tell when your weapon's ability is ready because you now have to look away from Kenzu in order to see it and this can be fatal in a boss fight. So the next step will be to add a VFX on Kenzu himself to aid this.
• We created a new illustration for the game’s cover.
• We added animations to the NPCs and introduced some dialogue bubbles. Narrative is still in an early stage and people told us it's confusing so we're focusing on improving this in following iterations.
• We rebalanced the game to make it more challenging.
• We added base colors to the boss (Baltus).
• We added music to the intro.
• And many other small tasks and bug fixes that we continue to work on.

Art Backstage
We’d like to share part of the creative and production process behind the game’s art. We hope you find it interesting!
Boldo is one of our first NPCs. He is an engineer from the Kobuko clan, one of the seven Kato clans. The Kobuko are known for their resilience. For hundreds of years, their lands were buried under piles and piles of scrap discarded by the great technological city of Otobi.
But they managed to adapt, using that same scrap—and their skills in blacksmithing and engineering—to build their village and their new home, Junktown.
Boldo is one of the workers who got trapped after the Muscari invasion of the lands surrounding Junktown. He now dedicates all his efforts to helping those who were trapped return to their home.
Here we show how one of our artists animated the character, starting from the rough stage and then moving to the polished version.