Previous Devlog #57: Party on the Beach (ft Skookum Arts and The Pedestrian)

Hello everyone,

This year we had the opportunity to attend one of the largest events in Ohio, the Columbus Arts Festival. Deckpoint Studio along with a few other Ohio indie game teams joined to form the Virtual Reality Booth. White Castle was kind enough to sponsor the big tent area we were set up in (ironically, only 2 of the presenters in the booth were actually showing off VR products but it was still awesome)!

VIDEO: New trailer showing off many beautiful locations, Ekosi battles, hanging out with friends, and more! Please note that it is showing off an intermediary version of the dialogue system. We have an even newer one down below!

Though it was hot and humid, we were very happy with the location and booth itself. Weather forecasts going into the weekend were gloomy, but we lucked out and didn’t get much rain while we were open.

The festival was a good experience for us since it provided us with a very different demographic of people compared to the other conventions we typically attend. At an event like GDEX or Ohayocon for example, most of the people that would play our game seemed to be in their 20’s. This time around most of the people that wanted to try our game were young children.

We were very surprised at how quickly some kids were able to pick up the game. Ekosi ain’t exactly rocket science, but it was still surprising to see sub-8-year-old kids get a hang of the game after playing one match without reading the tutorial.

Since the festival, we’ve continued to work on updating the dialogue system for the game. This new system is a vast improvement in almost every way: it’s more presentable, easier to work with, and is much less resource-intensive on the CPU. We’ve always felt our artwork was one of the stronger aspects of our game, and this new system will help show off the character art more. It’ll also give us new formatting options for how we present conversation text.

We can’t wait for this new system to be available in the public demo build. Since there is a great deal of dialogue that would need to be inputted into the new system, it will, unfortunately, be a few more weeks before this happens. We’ll definitely show more screenshots and gifs of the new system over the coming months. Hopefully, we’ll have the new system running for the demo build we’ll be presenting at GDEX later in October (11th-13th). Be sure to stop by our booth if you’re attending!

If you have questions or just want to chat, leave us a comment or join the conversation in our L7 Discord! We love questions and feedback.

Until next time,

Jonathan

Previous Devlog #57: Party on the Beach (ft Skookum Arts and The Pedestrian)