It was a very productive post-holiday week for Scraping Bottom Games. We worked hard to add features and squash bugs in order to finally get a playable version of our game ready… and with that, we are happy to announce that our game is officially in alpha! We’ll be showing you our improvements to our world map and game-pad support, as well as the voice of our main character. Most importantly, we’ve created a gameplay video showing one of our latest builds that we’d love to share with you.
Gameplay Video
We’ve still got a long way to go until release, but it’s nice to see parts of our game coming together. Since recording this video, Greg has made a bunch of improvements to the AI and Chip and Greg have done a lot of tweaking to the game’s difficulty and feel. We will be doing future gameplay sessions, so that you can keep track of how the game is progressing.
In-Game Menu and Full Game-pad Support
We implemented some necessary features into our game with a little help from the Unreal Marketplace and Unreal Engine. We now have an in-game menu and full game-pad support for Fictorum. It felt great to complete a play-through using an Xbox controller!
Region Map
Prior to this week, the Region Map was one of our weakest-looking features. It’s an important part of our game and we wanted to make sure that it looked as good as the rest of it. Here’s how it looked before:
This week, Chip made a bunch of improvements to the lighting, particle effects, and the actors within the map to give it a more eerie mood and a new coat of polish:
Voice-overs
Chip took a night away from UE4 to get some basic voiceovers done for our game. They’ll be redone before the final release, but they work well for now. Here are some that he recorded (with a little help—we’ll talk more about that next week).
Blow’n Stuff Up
We made some new gifs to show off within the community spotlight, so we thought you’d appreciate seeing more stuff being blown up. That never hurt anybody, right?
Level Improvements
Greg did a little more work on his favorite level, the only fall setting right now, and it is now our most complete setting:
Important Reddit Posts
We were asked to do a Community Spotlight post on r/gamephysics/ about our game. It’s very exciting to be stickied at the top of a 100,000 reader subreddit!
We’ve also compiled a list of our frequently asked questions and created an FAQ post on our /r/fictorum/ subreddit.
Next Week
- Greg plans on continuing to improve AI.
- Chip plans to work on giving spell shaping runes a massive overhaul.
- Hopefully, a big announcement regarding sound
Talk to you next week! Weekly updates can come straight to you by subscribing to our newsletter below:
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2 Comments
Are people able to play this game yet, I’d love to help in anyway with game testing, finding bugs and all that jazz.
(not trying to sound like I’m begging for alpha access, just trying to help)
Hi Dovah Rovah – Thank you for reaching out! We’re not at the point to have testers just yet, but if/when we open it up to that, we will let you know.