Here’s another update, bringing the game to version 1.1.1! This one focuses mainly on turtle stuff and adds a small new level:
Eïko (the main character) now has a little surfing animation when the turtle moves at medium speed. At high speed, he still crouches as before.
The turtle can now perform a little trick while jumping! Just press the jump button again during the leap and enjoy. It has no gameplay purpose—it’s just for fun.
A new collectible item has been added: the compass! When using the turtle, it displays a UI showing the cardinal directions. This should help you choose a global direction on the map and stick to it without constantly checking.
And this new item is hidden in a small, optional new area: the Pirate Base. You’ll have to look for it across the ocean. It might be a bit tedious to find if you already finished the main quest, but it should be easy to stumble across while exploring if you’re discovering the game.
I also took some time to fix little stuff here and there:
fix possible lock in a growing cactus in Desert Pagoda
fonts uniformization and optimization (memory improvement)
fix erroneous characters in some dialog lines
fix teleportation bug during final boss fight
bigger triggers for some paintings to get them easier
Hello everyone, and Happy New Year! So what’s new for this month of January? Quite a lot actually!
Improving Flow
As mentioned in the last post, I started a 1st beta test with a small group of lucky (or not so lucky?) friends, players, and designers. The feedback has been incredibly helpful. So, over the past month, I’ve been primarily improving the “flow” of the game. By flow, I mean: Do players understand what to do? Where to go? Is it clear enough? Are they getting lost? Is it too difficult or too boring? These are “high-level” improvements that can only be tackled once the “low-level” aspects are stable enough (no bugs, stable mechanics, understandable UI, etc.).
Here are some of the changes I made:
Added points of interest in various levels to guide the player’s eye, such as lanterns near important doors, contrasting plants (e.g., salads!), or floating particles.
Adjusted the placement of key items to make them more visible (e.g., the pianist in the bar); removing surrounding grass, adding lights, or creating distinct shapes to draw attention.
Enhanced readability by adding more contrast, such as larger cracks to hint at hidden secret walls, avoiding similar colors around important items, etc.
Tweaked colors to avoid confusion between different key badges, laser beams, or other items.
Added text bubbles that appear over distant important NPCs.
Made bigger cannonballs for improved readability.
Adjusted when new quests appear to better capture the player’s attention and fixed potential soft locks.
Added auto-save zones for overly challenging levels.
Updated maps with useful additional information.
Added nav-island posts on visited islands (expanding the game’s teleport system to make ocean exploration smoother).
Improved text and dialogue, adding emphasis by highlighting key words in different colors.
A more visible spot for the pianist
Turtles hang out around water salads and occasionnally “speak” to draw player’s attention.
A few more info on the map.
Scaling Levels and the World
One of the main pieces of feedback from the beta test was that the world felt “too big and empty.” So, I rescaled 4 of the largest and most annoying levels, as well as the world map. This was a huge task because I had to re-test all the levels to ensure that mechanics like jumps, projectiles, and distances still worked well—it wasn’t as simple as applying a global scale. Some elements had to remain their original size.
This scaling process corrupted previous save files (from beta testers and players who tried the demo), so I had to code a save porting system to ensure no progress was lost.
Rescaling the world also meant revisiting all the loading and activation zones for each island to avoid conflicts. Additionally, I had to rework the ocean textures to make them visually cohesive and compatible with the new world tiling.
For reference, the world is now 6x6km, still mostly water, with 18 zones/islands to explore. A few more zones are planned.
Lots of islands to discover.
Adding New Features
I also took the opportunity to add some new content to the game:
A new level: the Aqualums Library.
A painting shop on Aqualums.
A zoom/dezoom feature for the map.
Unrevealed areas on the map now show as “???” if you don’t have the local map.
Added aiming animations for the character when jumping or falling.
And a few new upgrades for the player to discover:
Focus Band: Slows time when aiming.
Lightness Ring: Enables smooth landings (without noise) near guards.
Pepper Salad: A boost for turtles, allowing them to travel faster and reducing journey time (this works well with the scaled-down world).
Magnetic Core: An upgrade for one of the weapons.
There are also now 4 outfits to collect, each with unique properties designed to be useful in different levels and situations.
An outfit to go faster.
General Upgrades
Finally, I’ve polished and improved several aspects of the game:
Updated the final cutscene.
Refactored weather zones code. Weather effects are now continuous in the open world, with sound effects and the ability to handle rain, thunder, pollen, snow, grass blades, and more. It’s also fully compatible with the world tiling.
My father has started working on the Spanish translation.
Fixed respawn zones (the zones that prevent falling into chasms) in all levels. Some were poorly designed and caused conflicts with cutscenes and dialogues, leading to soft locks.
Cleaned up old components and unused code.
Improved production tools: I can now generate all outside levels with a single click and perform better pre-release automated checks.
Tons of minor fixes and improvements.
Now the rain appears and disappears smoothly.
In the end, as a result of the beta test (which is still ongoing), I’ve built and released 6 more versions of the game, taking it from 1.0.6 to 1.0.12.
Festivals
This month, I didn’t do much marketing for the game, but I applied to 6 festivals: Storyteller, LudoNarraCon, Precision Platformer, Sportacular (for “Slide,” my other game), BIG LATAM, and Cozy & Family-Friendly Games Celebration. Fingers crossed!
A Little Christmas Game
Last but not least, for Christmas, I designed a small hidden object game where you search for family presents in my family’s house. I had previously made a similar game for my in-laws, but not for my own family. That’s been fixed now! You can play it for free here (in French, but you’ll figure it out):
Hello everyone! I’m so sorry, I’ve just realized I forgot to post the December news here! So here it is:
It’s time for another development update on Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody. Progress has been steady, with lots of improvements across the board. Let’s dive right in!
I – Functional & Graphics Improvements
I’ve been testing the full game once again after all the latest updates, and while things are looking better, I found plenty more to refine. Here’s what I’ve been focusing on lately:
Content Updates
World Enhancements: Every level has been upgraded with added details like vegetation, stencils, rocks, grass, fog effects, set dressing, and other polish.
Animal Additions: The world now features 35 unique animal species, with over 100 individual animals scattered throughout. Each one has its own avatar too!
Collectible Quests: I’ve compiled a complete list of animals and flowers, so now the “collect” quests are officially finishable.
Chocolate Placement: Three chocolates now grant you one additional heart, and you can finish the game with a total of 10 hearts.
Key & Boss Updates: All key cards and bosses now have updated avatars.
New SFX: A tiny but satisfying touch—slingshot sound effects are in!
Fixes
Graphics Issues: I’ve addressed glitches with lock FXs, transparency problems, and visual FX bugs.
Character Faces: Some NPCs and guards got a facelift, literally! Improved skin textures and optimized imports make them more consistent.
Grapple & Climb Bugs: Annoying issues with these mechanics in certain cases have been resolved.
Save Fixes: Fixed saving problems with open-world bosses.
Camera Consistency: Now the camera behaves uniformly when showing switches or doors being activated.
Optimizations
Merged plant objects for better performance.
Cleaned up old, unused game objects.
Refined and updated the world map.
With these changes, the main and side quests are now fully functional. There’s still a bit of content to add in certain zones, but overall, the game is graphically nearly as polished as the demo. Characters look more coherent, and here are a few new screenshots:
That said, there’s still plenty to do in terms of narration, cutscenes, music, and sound. Those will be the next big areas of focus!
II – Community & Festivals
Steam Next Fest
I participated in the Steam Next Fest recently. The results were a mixed bag; +800 wishlists: Not as many as I had hoped, but the feedback was positive. Players enjoyed the demo, which is great reassurance for me as a solo dev!
GWB Awards Finalist
I was thrilled to be a finalist in the GWB Awards (organized by Tencent). While I didn’t win, making it that far was already a big achievement—it’s the first time Zefyr has been selected for a festival with such high standards.
I also got a small visibility boost from being featured on the dedicated Steam page for a few days, which brought in +100 wishlists.
So I added this nice logo to the Steam page (the 1st of the reward section):
Social Media
I’ve been trying to stay active on social media, with posts on Reddit (where I’m still running a few ads), X, and Bluesky. Speaking of Bluesky—it’s been blowing up lately! I gained over 1,000 followers in just a few weeks, thanks to being featured in a few “Game Dev” starter packs.
The full game is now in the hands of a few trusted friends for testing. And luckily… they’re not holding back. They’ve pointed out a lot of issues, especially with the level flow in some critical areas. I’ll be addressing all their feedback to ensure future testers don’t have to suffer as much!
Private Beta in December
The next step is the official private beta test, which I plan to launch in December. Think of it as a little Christmas present for some of you.
I’ll share the details on my social platforms, Patreon, and Discord, so stay tuned!
That’s it for now. Thanks so much for your continued support—it means the world to me.
Take care, and I’ll see you in the next update, hopefully a beta announcement! Peace!
The demo and prologue of Zefyr are now available in a new language: Spanish (from Spain)! I hope it’s also relevant for Latin American players too. Of course, the full game will also be translated, but since this part is done, I decided to push the update to Steam right away!
By the way, it was my dad who localized the game! He’s a retired Spanish professor. I hope everything is accurate, but don’t hesitate to let me know if you spot any typos or if certain words could be improved. He speaks Spanish very well, but since he’s not a gamer, some terms might be a little off. Any feedback is welcome!
It was super nice working with him—it brought back memories of my old Spanish lessons at school!
On another note, the demo will be featured in Steam Next Fest next week (October, 14th). I really hope the game will reach a much larger audience. Fingers crossed! 🙂
And a piece of good news to wrap up this quick post: the full game has made it onto Steam’s “Most Wishlisted Games” list, which is a huge milestone for a solo, unknown dev like me. Of course, I’m near the bottom of the charts, but it should still give me a bit more visibility for the full release.
I hope you’re all doing well! July and August have flown by, and I’ve been working on Zefyr of course, but not exclusively. Here’s a recap of what’s been happening:
I – Game Improvements
Over the last few weeks, my focus has been on polishing Zefyr and improving its overall functionality, especially for the demo and the upcoming full release:
Detail Fixes: I’ve addressed various issues related to localization, narration, and dialogues. One major concern from players was the inconsistency with the protagonist—sometimes being completely silent (like Link) and other times unexpectedly chatty. I’ve worked to better balance this. There’s still more to refine, but it should already feel much more natural. I’ve also improved how important information is delivered to the player, while keeping character interactions and dialogue believable in a world where characters have already known each other for some time. In addition, I adjusted camera placement during specific dialogues to improve immersion.
Missing Elements: The demo was missing some avatars, UI help, and sound effects, so I’ve added those in. I also fixed some minor UI input glitches to make the user experience smoother.
Functional Maps: All maps are now fully functional! The goal was to keep them simple enough to be easily readable (the old ones were too cluttered, and players were struggling with them). While I still plan to add more visual details in the future, they are now much more user-friendly.
II – Mini Holiday Game with My Kids
In early August, I took a little time off to work on a fun side project with my kids: a simple platformer game. It was a holiday project, and they had so much fun designing characters and biomes. It took just a week to develop, but it was a refreshing creative break from my main project.
The game is about searching for animals in a forest. Along the way, I coded mechanics like coyote jumps, buffered inputs (basic platformer stuff), and even a grapple mechanic! We used LDtk for level design, and the kids created the graphics for the biomes, designed the game rules, and built the levels. I also added a multiplayer mode—because, let’s face it, a family game needs to be played together! It was a really fun project to work on, and you can try it out here: Animal Chase. It’s a cozy, cooperative game, perfect for kids and families.
Here are a few screens:
And here’s a look at the level in LDtk (just simple pixels with an associated value (wall/tree/bush)) and the original graphics on a sketchbook:
Now my kids want to keep adding more things—new items, biomes, and levels. Let’s see if I can keep up with their enthusiasm!
III – BIG Communication Push for Steam Next Fest
As you might know, the demo will be featured in the Steam Next Fest in October. So, I’ve been pouring a lot of energy into marketing and promotion to get the word out:
Reddit & Facebook Ads: I’ve been posting organically on Reddit and running ads on both Reddit and Facebook to build awareness. Every little bit helps when you’re a solo dev!
Outreach to Streamers: I’ve sent out over 400 emails to streamers and content creators to prepare for the Steam Next Fest. The goal is to get as many eyes as possible on the demo during the event.
Updated Press Kit: I refreshed the press kit with new screenshots, descriptions, and improved assets, making it easier for the press and content creators to feature the game. Here are a few recent screens:
Festival Applications: I’ve submitted Zefyr to several indie festivals, including Indie X, Adventure X, Save N Sound, and the OTK Winter Games. Fingers crossed I get some good news from these!
Prologue Release: The prologue was launched at the end of July, and I think it brought around 800 additional wishlists to the full game! Right now, the game has a total of 5,800 wishlists, which is a decent number, but still not enough to make it into the “Popular Upcoming” titles on Steam. I’ll need to keep pushing the marketing to reach that level.
That’s it for now!
As always, thank you so much for your continued support—it truly means the world to me.
I hope you’re all doing well. This month has been packed with updates and improvements to Zefyr, and I’m excited to share them with you. Here’s what we’ve been working on:
I – Steam Builds
Now there are Steam Achievements for the prologue, the demo, and the full game. I’ve built and deployed the prologue version on Steam, and updated the demo with the latest fixes. I’ve also written a Steam post stating the Deck Compatibility.
In case you don’t know, the prologue is a free version of a game. In my case, it’s the exact same thing as the demo but it reaches a different audience on Steam. If you want to help me, the best way is to play the (free) prologue on the release day and leave a review! This helps a lot for the visibility of my game.
II – Polish & Content
I’ve mainly polished the 3rd chapter:
Villa Level: I’ve added details to the kitchen, bathroom, and more cushions and furniture. There’s also a cute cat roaming around now!
Green Island: added towers, rocks, stone walls, and hidden rewards.
Mines: Designed a specific font for text and used it on screens and panels. I’ve also added buckets, picks, and wires to enrich the environment.
Robot Factory: Enhanced with stencils, screens, wires, and improved ambiance to give it a more industrial feel.
Aeolia Island: more flowers to make the world vibrant and colorful, better stone placement, more vegetation.
A few screens:
To balance gameplay, eating 3 chocolates now grants 1 additional heart. This allows to place more rewards in levels without overpowering the player. Plus it gives a good feeling of progression.
III – New Link UI
I’ve been wanting to redesign the link UI for a while now, (some people have been asking for it). So here it is:
UI Overhaul: There’s now a new, more intuitive tab-based navigation.
Status Page: Added a new status page that shows the game main items to unlock.
Help Update: Improved the help section for better player guidance.
Animal Descriptions: Added detailed descriptions for all animals in the game.
I’ve also updated the rendering of maps, with shaders and outlines to ensure visual consistency and readability. It took quite some time to fix all the rendering bugs due to projection maths for the clip planes.
The flute avatar has been tweaked to distinguish it from the bo staff, and avatars for certain bosses have been updated.
Here’s how it look like:
IV – Mesh Generator Tool
I’ve developed a new mesh generator tool to speed up the creation of vegetation. This tool allows me to generate detailed and varied plant life much faster, enhancing the level design processing significantly (from 20 mn to 10 s on some levels). Plus it’s lighter on memory so it doesn’t crash anymore on super dense levels. What a breeze!
V – Bugs & Fixes
Lots of bug fixes, among which:
Resolved issues with instantiating two map cameras
Fixed lots of glitched click and select functions
Optimized the UI for better performance and resolved button overlap issues
Tested the UI from 5:4 screen ratio to 21:9 to ensure compatibility across different screen sizes
Level Design: made numerous small fixes to improve overall level design
That’s all for this month! Thank you for your continued support and patience. Stay tuned for more updates, and take care!
Hello everyone! I hope you’re doing well. I’ve been working a lot to improve Zefyr, and this month’s update is pretty huge.
I – Polish
Levels
First, I took some time to rework some pretty old levels. They were functional but a bit empty and rough around the edges. I mainly worked on a mansion, a snowy tower, and a pirate chase (no precise names to avoid spoilers). I added grass, trees, ivy, rocks, lights, benches, dialogues, paths, animals, and various other details. I also fixed lots of little bugs and reworked some cutscenes (positioning, behaviors, missing elements). I can’t describe everything, but here are a few screens:
Some improved environments…
Items & Gameplay Elements
I improved the grapple and the magnetic bow. Now, there are little particles and nice sounds when you use them. I hope it’s easier to read and understand too. The magnetic bow now uses the climb/magnetic energy instead of separate ammo, which makes level design easier and is much more forgiving for the player. I added various FX & SFX (bosses, weapons, camera placement on explosions, rock breaks, …)
The magnetic arrows bounce off walls with many visual fxs.
The grapple now has this violet/purple translucent look which is consistent with all the magnetic item/weapons.
I had to design logos and visual identities for the game various events/enterprises.
Breaking rocks is not that easy to code; you have to take into account the volume and orientation of the base shape to generate smaller stones.
UI
I integrated some UI effects, including particles and sounds when you gain life or money and when you move around the menus. There are also background particles to bring life to the interface and a custom cursor for the mouse.
Optimization & Steam Deck
I spent quite some time optimizing dynamic loading times in the open world. It’s not perfect but much better than it was. This enabled me to re-test the game on Steam Deck, and it works pretty well with good quality! I also rechecked all the font sizes (not too small) so that I could ask Steam to get officially validated for Steam Deck. Sadly, it seems I’m too small for them to review and stamp the game.
Rewriting Code
While optimizing, I also cleaned the tag system and integrated the localization of controls (which is a 3rd party library) into my main localization system. It’s much easier to support now!
Audio
On top of working on various sound effects for items, characters, and gameplay elements, I set up a centralized audio system to avoid the annoying comb effect when the same sound is launched multiple times at the same moment (or too close in time). But this forced me to decouple sounds from the visual effects. Still a work in progress.
Options & Menus
As I optimized the game, I added several options regarding performance and other aspects:
FPS target
Full screen vs. windowed support
Changed the dropdown menus to simpler buttons, which are easier to navigate
Controls now have 2 categories, with hopefully more intuitive settings regarding axis inversions
Option to disable step echo
The item wheel selection is now easier to navigate from both joypad and keyboard/mouse
Better help display
Menus are navigable with the d-pad
Various graphical options.
With all these new features, I updated the demo on Steam.
II – Marketing
As usual, I still struggle with marketing. However, I applied to the Indie Cup, the OTK Pixel Pitch, and the Jump High festival. I also entered the Steam Autumn Festival with the Zefyr demo. Hopefully, these will bring some visibility to the game.
I also tried to post more often on my social media (Twitter, BlueSky, Threads, Discord) and even reached out to streamers/players on Twitter, but without any success for now.
Here come the latest news ! Last month I essentially spent my time on 3 subjects:
I – Marketing
And yes, you know it now, I force myself to spend more time on marketing… and boy is it difficult. I tried to optimize my reddit ads, but I was disappointed in the results. It seems the longer the ads run, the lower the conversion rates. So I tried to go back to organic posts. One did quite well on r/pcgaming: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1byxmvv/hi_ive_been_working_solo_on_zefyr_a_thiefs_melody/
I also took the time to apply to 4 festivals for this summer. Sadly, I received negative answers from the last ones I applied too. A bit harsh for the moral.
On the Steam side, I built and fixed my full game and the prologue version too to have them validated by Steam, and they were accepted ! I have officially passed the Steam quality test. From now on, I shouldn’t be annoyed with the process anymore. I also reworked the tags for the Steam pages. It seems to perform OK for the prologue but not that much for the full game. People don’t discover it on Steam. But the prologue is free, so I guess this can influence things.
Finally, I kept mailing streamers, but no luck this time. However, one streamer from my previous contacts tried my game and interviewed me! He was super nice and it was a pleasure to answer his questions. You can check out the interview (in French) if you want to know more about how I work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFKFDEz1bLs
So in the end, a bit of a depressing month for the marketing except for the reddit post & the interview.
II – Mini Game
Last month, we had holidays here in France, and with the kids at home, it’s always a bit difficult for me to work fully on the game. So I worked on a small project that I called Lantern Island. It’s a small wholesome game where you play as Maya, a young girl trying to save the lantern festival on a nice cosy island. It’s supposed to be somewhere between “A short hike” & “alba”. This is one of these “small games” I occasionally try to create to test myself. I think I’ll release this one when it’ll be more polished. Here are a few screens:
I had to work on many NPCs and animals too. I’ll add these back into Zefyr, so that I kill two birds with one stone. And I took the time to code the famous “pet the dog” interaction. Speaking of which…
III – Zefyr
Yes, I also worked a bit on the game itself. Here are a few improvements:
I reused the “pet the dog” code from Lantern Island. You can now pet the dog in Zefyr too. Even if it’s more of a fennec fox actually.
Descriptions for all inventory objects
New footstep sound visual FX, hopefully less annoying
Shadow under the character when jumping to help for precise landing
And that’s it for this month. As usual, thanks a lot for your support & patience ! Take care!
Here’s the usual update of the last month(es). I mainly worked on NPC & marketing during January & February.
I – NPC (Non Playable Characters)
During the past weeks, I upgraded my old placeholders for the NPC (the characters you’ll have to interact with in the game). For each NPC, I need to work on:
Visual design: I usually start with doodles on my sketch book. I try to also get an idea of the basic color scheme.
3D Modelisation: I tend to reuse old model parts if possible (hands for example)
Texturing: I paint the textures in Blender and/or Krita and map them on the character
Rigging (creating the skeleton): I almost always start from another skeleton that I copy and scale/adapt to the new character morphology. I might encounter difficulties for the clothes especially (be sure they dont collide with the limbs for example). Some designs are more exotic than others regarding this point, and it might be a difficult problem to solve.
Animation : I create at least one idle animation, and usually 1 or 2 more (speak, variations of movements, …)
Integration in the game: I have to put the NPC in the game, and be sure that evertything loads & links correctly
Coding the presence logic: depending on time and actions done by the player, the NPC are not at the same place at the same moment.
Coding the dialog logic: depending on your actions, the character won’t say the same things. They can also create new quests or complete some. They can add items to the inventory, change story key points, …
Dialog & names localization: for each line, I have to translate it in French and English.
Avatar: I have to paint a 2D version of the character that will show in the dialog UI.
Now that I have all my workflow and tools set up, it generally takes between a few days and two weeks of work for each character, depending on the complexity and originality. This doesn’t include the debug of course. I sometimes find problems much later.
So in the end, I added/polished 8 NPC. Here are a few screens:
There are still other ones to create of course, but it’s starting to be nice.
II – Marketing
Regarding the marketing:
I still work on reddit ads. They bring some regular visits to the Steam page.
I started to contact streamers (youtube/twitch) to market the demo. I had to update my presskit with recent screens & logos. I reached out to 50 people, but it only ended up with a few videos. However, they are really nice (like this one, or this one (in French) for example) and the streamers were happy with the game. I need to keep on working on this.
Finally, I keep on trying to enter festivals. I recently took part in the Ninja & Pirates festival on Steam, but it wasn’t that successful for me. I also applied to the Cozy Family, WASD Curios & the Mix. We’ll see what comes out of it.
III – Bug fixes
Not a lot to signal here. Mainly:
arrow collision fix (this was a tough one, I couldn’t replicate it on my PC, so a big thanks to “Les Indés Primés” channel for helping me)
now saves in turtle mode
a few textures fixes here and there
This allowed me update the demo on Steam.
And that’s it ! The game is improving little by little. As usual, thanks a lot for your support and patience.
Hello there, and a Happy New Year to all of you! I wish you health, joy, happy moments with family and friends, and fulfillment in your projects.
On my side, the last month has been quite productive with lots of little enhancements. It’s quite pleasing to see all these small upgrades slowly propagate through the entire game.
Level Upgrade
First, I worked on the visual upgrade of an old level that was far behind the others. I can’t show too much without spoiling, but you can check this out:
Still some work to do, but it’s already much more understandable than the previous “blocking state” look. I added crates, fabrics, desks, armchairs, sofas, pinboards, billboards, plants, arches, and architectural elements.
Doors & Enemies
I also took some time to start working on two things that were on my to-do list for a long time: signaling locked doors to players and adding contextual idle animations to enemies to tell a story without explicit dialogs.
Here you can see a mining robot. Yeah, I guess it’s better with animation and sound.
I used some kind of “hologram” to display the locked state of the door. I also use the hologram look on various other screens/displays/technological stuff throughout the world, so I thought that was the most logical thing to do. Plus, it’s pretty immediate to understand.
Unexpected Complexity
At some point, I added a super small improvement: displaying the maximum number of items that the player can collect. Surprisingly, this led to tricky questions about what I should do with unpickable items: destroy them? But when? What if the player can eat a few apples to regenerate her life and THEN free up some space to grab the apple on the ground? If the apple is destroyed the first time she tries to pick it, this feels unfair. Then should items be left on the ground? For how long? Should it be saved? What happens if the player moves to another island and gets back? And what will be the feedback for players to understand that they can’t take the item? It’s much more complex than one can expect, actually…
Many Bug Fixes & Improvements
In the end, I worked on ~ 250 fixes and updates, among which:
fix old collision bugs
fix bugs regarding missions, stories and dialogs
fix animation of robots & pirates
fix dialog translation
fix confusing stuff
fix graphical stuff (textures, reflection probes, particles, outline, cutscenes, shaders, bubble font size for 4K) on chapter 2
clean database (old prefabs)
fix old bugs arising from mode conflicts (what happens when cutscene+dialog+power up at the same time for exemple ?)
add NPC Reno in zoological center + power up animal detector
add accesibility option for camera moves
improve full item capacity handling & feedback
add fx & sfx for steps on terrain, rain, snow & breath in cold
clean/organization on disk for il2cpp compilation (optimized build & console compatible)
improve saves: bugs fix, clean & compatible steam save
upload test build to steam
And that’s it ! As usual, thanks a lot for your support. I truly hope to be able to show the final game this year.
Another month has passed, and for once, I’ve focused my work mainly on one thing. Remember my last attempt to create dynamic and slightly authored topologies from the last post? Well, I’ve taken it a step further. It’s now evolving into a level editor for Zefyr, and hopefully, other games. While I’ve already designed lots of levels for Zefyr directly within Blender, I’ve noticed some struggles in my workflow. Hopefully, this custom tool could help me iterate faster. I think I’ll use it to create bonus levels.
Base topology generated from a flow map and user-authored streamlines
Tile brushes created from basic quad and tri tiles
Auto creation of missing tile configurations when possible
Auto-smooth for normals
“Smart” gizmo snapping to the best neighbor to paint
Horizontal and vertical radii for brush size
Random variations from the tile set when available
Erase modifier
Selections
Entity brushes to create specific objects on the terrain with various parameters (snapping, random rotation, scale variations, propagate normals, …)
Scatter/spread mode for entities to quickly create vegetation for example
Warping/deform of the level through the underlying grid (FFD). Dynamic repositioning of entities
Undo
UI
Basic UI and keyboard shorcuts
Previews for tile & entity brushes
SAVES
Export to binary & ascii fbx
Save & load to json format
And I used it “for real” to create a 1st level that I imported into Zefyr! Yay. Finally, I have a fully functional pipeline. Check it out:
OK it’s a bit empty for now, but it’s only a matter of adding other brushes (rocks, vegetation, enemies, rewards, etc…).
II – What will it do ?
Of course, there are bugs, it’s not super stable, and it’s still missing many features, but in the end, it should have the following:
GLTF export (not for me at the moment, but if I plan to release this tool one day, it should be here, plus I love their open standard philosophy)
Ability to manually draw topology with a single stroke with automatic smart connection to already existing topology
Copy-paste (which will be something, given that the underlying topology is never the same)
Combining both previous tools: remodel an existing level by hand drawing contours/underlying topology. This one could be a killer feature. I’m still not sure if it’s even possible, but I like the idea
Layers
Custom properties on entities
Placement correction for each entity (move/scale/rotate)
Brush/entity/color sampling
Vertex color painting (mainly for terrain texture variations)
1D & 2D tile brushes (for electric wires, fences, walls)
Add Wave Function Collapse to create general rules for automatic tile placement/validation. Imagine painting a road inside an existing town, and the surroundings would automatically adapt, creating tunnels, bridges, and connections where there should be.
This can also lead to smart brushes generating content semi-procedurally to directly paint districts/biomes
Also giving smart brushes the ability to spawn entities dynamically on tiles. This should allow painting buildings with windows, air conditioners, antennas, plants, or whatever could be on top of them with a single stroke.
Fill tool to repaint/change the look/style of whole areas at once
As always, thank you immensely for your ongoing support! If you want to support me financially (if you don’t already) you can check out my Patreon. Thanks a loooooot !
September has passed, and it’s time for a little summary. What’s new this month?
I – Marketing
I’m still focusing on marketing with ads on Reddit and festival applications. The ads are yielding some results, and I’ve reached 3000 wishlists for the game. It’s not bad, but if I want the game to have a chance to succeed, I must aim for at least 10,000 wishlists. So, there’s still a lot of work to do!
I’ve also spent some time tracking similar games that streamers have played in the last few months to reach out to them. Hopefully, this should happen in the next few weeks.
Luckily, since the demo came out, some streamers spontaneously played the game (here, here or here or here), and were quite positive. However, it didn’t reach a super large audience. Nonetheless, it’s always comforting to see people play and enjoy my game!
II – New Little Game
And now, a little surprise! This summer, I took a detour from Zefyr and worked on some small projects (as I usually do during holidays). This time, I worked on “Splash Kids”, a co-op game about my family recoloring a gray city and fighting the Zombie-pocalypse. It’s a mix of Splatoon and Zombies Kids. I created this game as a gift for my (numerous) nephews. It was a lot of fun to work on and allowed me to experiment with new techniques and systems:
A customizable avatar generation system
General-purpose GPU computing (GP-GPU) for map coloring
Custom GPU instancing with tweening shader animation for vegetation
This was super interesting from a technical perspective, and I believe the final game was well-received. It’s completely free, and you can check it out here: https://oneiricworlds.itch.io/family
III – Classes & Level Editor
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been conducting classes on Game Design and Level Design. Consequently, progress on Zefyr has slowed down a bit. However, during this time, I dedicated some effort to develop a tool to enhance and streamline level design. I’m not entirely certain about its potential, as the mathematical aspects are more complex than expected. Nevertheless, I sense some promising possibilities.
Here’s the idea: envision something like Townscraper, but with the ability to control the base grid. Artists can provide simple, independent 3D tiles for the level designer to swiftly paint a semi-procedural 3D city (or any kind of level actually). This could be useful for rapid prototyping (which I’ve noticed consumes a lot of my time). While I think similar tools exist for regular quad grids, there’s a gap for completely customizable topologies. If this tool proves successful, I’ll use it for many of my projects, and hopefully, others can benefit from it as well.
Currently, it’s in a very early stage, quite rudimentary, buggy, and not very intuitive. Nonetheless, here’s a glimpse of what it looks like:
Roads (main topology lines) are built from a flowmap (or tensor field for math people) that the user can manually draw
Automatic quadrangulation/triangulation for concav inner parts. Far from perfect, but we’ll get there.
And that concludes this month’s update. As always, thank you immensely for your ongoing support! If you want to support me financially (if you don’t already) you can check out my Patreon. Thanks a loooooot !
It’s been 2 months since the last post, and I must be honest, it has mainly been due to the holidays! However, I took some time to work on two main things:
Patreon
I reworked my Patreon page. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a platform to financially help creators (artists, musicians, youtubers, … you name it). Over the years I had a few supporters, and recently, I reevaluated the tiers and rewards because I realized that my backers don’t actually claim the rewards. I guess they are more here to support my work and my vision. So thanks a lot for that, guys and girls. I also removed the physical goods because it doesn’t align with my values (I don’t want to encourage consumption, especially in today’s world).
So here it is:
I made a few paintings of different “guardians” to update the page. And by the way, if you want to support my work, don’t hesitate to subscribe ! Thanks a lot !
Steam Festivals
During the summer, I also took part in 2 Steam festivals: the Steam Stealth Festival and the Dreamhack Beyond week. It helped me spread the game a bit more, but sadly, it wasn’t a huge success either. So I’ll have to keep on marketing the game through other means. I’ll count on you more than ever to spread the word to your gamer friends!
It was quite cool to see my game between the awesome Tomb Raider & Batman.
Anyways, that’s it for the summer months. Next, I’ll work on polishing the last part of the game and continue with marketing.
Have a great day, and stay tuned for next month when I’ll share a little surprise.
— Oneiric Worlds – 🐢 Zefyr is OUT NOW (@oneiricworlds) July 24, 2023
Don’t hesitate to stream it, share it to the world, ask your favorite youtuber or twitcher to play it, write an article about it on reddit… Whatever you can think of to help spread the news!
Thanks a lot for the support!
And that’s all for this short, but super important news!
Another month has passed, and with it, a few improvements to the game and other stuff. Let’s start with…
I – The Technical Part
Firstly, the saves are now encrypted, which prevents “easy cheating.” For example, manually editing the save files with a text editor to add unlimited ammo for the player. Now, the save files are encoded in binary after a basic cipher. While this won’t stop super hackers from doing what they want, it should deter a good percentage of cheaters.
I also took some time to upgrade the “Ocean Heart” level, adding vegetation, waterfalls, and various rewards. This is intended to be a bonus level that players have to discover themselves.
II – Official Demo
Now, for a BIG milestone: I’ve prepared the final build for the demo, which will be released on:
July 24th, 2023
…during a Steam festival. Hopefully, this will generate more visibility and attract more people to discover the game. So mark your calendars for July 24th.
III – Communication
Lately, I’ve been focusing on improving communication, as it is crucial to spread the word. I now have an official “reveal” trailer that you can check out here:
Next week, I plan to issue a press release to share it with the world. This should hopefully result in some press articles.
I’ve also submitted the game to two more video game festivals, although I haven’t been successful yet.
Finally, I’m still actively sharing my work on Reddit through ads and regular posts. One of my posts performed well in a Mexican subreddit. It really forces me to practice my Spanish.
As you may know, from time to time, I like to take a few days off working on smaller projects to test ideas and technologies. I have previously shared a few games I created in the past years:
This time, I participated in a game jam with the theme “Pepper & Carrot.” If you’re not familiar, it’s a free and open-source webcomic about a little witch and her cat created by David Revoy. You can check it out here: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/
The goal was to make a game set in the universe of the webcomic. I really wanted to focus on two main things:
Achieving a “hand-painted” look
Experimenting with new techniques for vegetation rendering that I could potentially use in my other games.
It’s completely free, but don’t expect too much from it as it was made in just one week.
By the way, for the first time, I also participated in “live dev” streaming sessions on Twitch (I was invited by a friend). So if you want to see me work and hear me struggle to speak English, check it out here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1864781457. (Maybe twitch will remove it in a few days)
It’s time for a quick game update! So, what’s new this month?
I – Polish
I have mainly focused on polishing various systems, including maps, dialogs, and some sounds:
Maps: I have made significant improvements to the maps by handcrafting them. Previously, they were top-down renders, which looked cool but were not very understandable. Many meshes were overlapping, making it difficult for players to identify the platforms. Therefore, I took the time to design the maps manually for each level of the demo. I hope this has made them much more readable. Additionally, I have also reworked the icons, avatars, and map borders. Check it out:
Maps showing 2 floors of the same level.
Dialogs: to make the texts and dialogs more engaging, I integrated a third-party library called “Text Animator for Unity” (https://www.febucci.com/text-animator-unity/). I initially had a custom-made system to display letters one by one, and I started exploring how to dynamically add shaking, growing, or shrinking effects. However, as I delved deeper into it, I realized that coding it correctly would take quite some time. Therefore, I opted for an existing library that already offers these functionalities. This has improved the dialog box and I have also reworked the speech bubbles that appear when characters speak. Additionally, I added interjections, especially when the player jumps.
Little interjections to give a bit more life to the character.
Sound Design: I have continued working on sound design, focusing this time on animal sounds such as ducks, cats, dogs, fennec foxes, and sheep. I have also worked on item sounds for doors, chests, arrow blocks, and cannons.
II – Next Demo
OK, with all these improvements plus working on the content of the 1st chapter, I can finally see the finish line for the demo release. In fact…
I plan to release the demo in July.
I have just completed a “release candidate” build and will start sharing keys for people to test. So stay tuned for the upcoming announcements! It’s a significant achievement for me after all these years to finally be able to consider a part of the game “DONE.” Of course, there will be bugs and things to fix, but in terms of content, intention, and quality, I believe it’s all there… (for the demo, of course, not for the final game).
Some new content: a species of flower.
Very soon, you will be able to tell all your friends, “Go check out this crazy indie dev” if you want to spread the word, of course 🙂
As for the rest of the game, another tester has completed it (making a total of 4 people, including myself). There is still a lot to correct and fix, but I am gradually bringing it up to the quality level of the demo.
The first playable version of the home island from 2014.
Final version of the home island. And yes, now you can see all the other islands in the world. Quite some progress!
III – Communication
Regarding the marketing, here are two main updates:
First, I tried running Reddit ads, and the results are quite interesting. It has gradually increased the number of wishlists, so I think I’ll continue with this strategy and work on optimizing the process.
Secondly, I have created a Discord server as some people have requested. Here’s the link if you want to join: https://discord.gg/bPnUzNrjyd. However, there isn’t much to do or see on it at the moment. I’ll use it to share important news and updates, of course.
And, as always, I’ve been focusing on bug fixes and code cleaning. I won’t bore you with the details.
I hope you found this update interesting. As always, thank you so much for your support and patience, and I’ll see you next month!
Welcome to the April update! What’s new this month?
Ocean Gameplay
I’ve been working on the ocean gameplay and now, the waves have a real influence on the gameplay! The turtle can move up and down waves and I have also added the ability to jump. This makes the controls more inline with the character and feels pretty cool. Additionally, there are crates floating in the ocean that we can destroy to get bonuses.
It wasn’t an easy task to set up, as I had to rewrite all the water detection code to make it compliant with the physics engine. So now, the water code is computed in CPU for collision and GPU for rendering, and the two versions must behave exactly the same. It was also challenging to set up real-time NON-PLANAR reflection (due to waves).
Here’s a video of the latest version of the ocean gameplay:
I have worked on a few NPCs, including 3D models, texturing, animation, and 2D avatars for dialogues. Here are a few screenshots:
Work in progress, of course; there are still many other ones to work on.
New Dojo Selection Screen
I spent some time designing a more interesting dojo selection screen. One big problem in my game was that the player collected gems but without really knowing why. Now, the first time the player enters a dojo, she can get a glimpse of what’s coming up and how much it’s going to cost. This gives good motivation to collect gems (but there are other cool things to buy, of course).
Sound Design
I finally started to work seriously on sound design, beginning with the main character. Now, there are sounds for footsteps, jump, roll, attack, landing, slide, and climbing. There are subtle variations (pitch, volume, audio source) on each occurrence to not annoy the player on the long run.
Communication
I’ve entered a few more festival selections in order to showcase the game on Steam. Sadly, I had quite a few rejections (as for now, I’ve applied to 15 festivals and was only accepted to 1). It’s kind of hard for motivation, but I’ll keep applying. Luckily, what I’ve been sharing on Reddit had some great traction and feedback until now, as you can see here:
Yes, I’m trying to post a bit more regularly these days. I hope I’ll stick to it. So here’s the summary of what I did this month:
Saves
As I had some friends test the game, I had to rework the save system. When something went wrong during testing, the save file became corrupted, so I needed a way to fix it so that players could keep playing on the next session. I migrated the old binary save system to a newer and more flexible one without breaking the current tester saves. Now, it’s based on textual JSON, which is easy to update and debug, and surprisingly faster than the old system. Of course, I’ll have to encrypt it when releasing the game.
Ocean
After this big (and quite invisible to the player) technical part, I wanted to “rest” a little bit, and I started to work on something very fun & visible: the ocean. It’s been years since I last worked on it (check this 10-YEAR-OLD previous post), and with the feedback of players and internet comments, I decided to add geometrical waves to it. Until now, it was perfectly flat, even if there were a few normal maps.
So I became a “tech artist” for a few days, and I added many improvements to the waves:
vertex displacement with various layers of movement
color variations
moving foam on the ocean surface
splashing foam at the wave top
little particle splashes on top of waves too (I had to code a 3D gradient ascent to put them in good places)
hue variation based on a fake depth (super useful for the design of one level particularly)
sparkles reacting to bloom on certain angles reflecting the moon or the sun
I wanted the ocean to be gorgeous, and to call the player for exploration, because it’s a big selling point of the game! And here’s how it looks like now:
at the moment, I dont want to rewrite all the gameplay moves on the ocean, so I had to make it visually interesting without breaking the existing gameplay code
the world is cyclic, which means the ocean has to be continuous from one map edge to the other. Indeed, the player “teleports” from one side of the map to the other when she gets out of it, and the ocean MUST be tilable so that the teleport can’t be spotted. This involves using smart texture & mask scaling to hide the trick, but also hide obvious repetitions.
While working on the ocean, I also took the time to remove the black outline on the foam and later on all visual effects. That was disturbing and didn’t match the art direction for the game. But I had to set up a different render stack for the whole game. I think it’s for the better in the end.
Trailer
Following the previous post, I created a trailer for the game prologue. This time, I composed the music first, thinking about what would appear in the trailer. I think it’s a better approach, and the final video is now available on the Steam page, or here below:
Sadly, I worked on the ocean AFTER the trailer, so it’s the old version that we can see in it. Anyways, I’ll have to update the trailer one day or the other…
Others
While testing the game, I corrected many things, including bugs, dialogs, level design, and puzzle design.
That’s it for this month! I hope this was interesting.
For once, it hasn’t been that long since the last blog post! Yay! So what’s new since last time ?
Tests
I’m still testing the full game with a few people. I’ve been correcting some soft-locks, too-hard puzzles, missing dialogs and explanations, I’ve improved mission descriptions… The game is better with each test, but not polished enough yet. Plus it still lacks all the secondary content.
UI (User Interface) upgrade
I wasn’t very satisfied with it, like if the style was a bit off with the rest of the game. So I tried various stuff and ended with the following. I’m still working on it, but I’ve upgraded the title screen, the menus, and the dialogs. I still need to work on the in-game inventory though. I also added a few sound effects, and tested the UI with a keyboard, a mouse and a controller to check nothing conflicts.
New dialog boxMore colorful and detailed title screen.Option menu (Graphics).
Video
I worked on few 3D assets, among which a directional wood sign to help the player locates herself. I made a little tutorial video from it (in French):
I created 2D assets for a prologue page on Steam. Basically it’s a free (but limited) version of the game (somehow like a demo). It helps spreading the game around a bit more. I also submitted the game to some festivals. Hopefully, I’ll get accepted in a few of them.
Steam
I uploaded my first builds on it, and I started to implement the Steam API (useful for achievements for example). A friend tested the game on the Steam Deck, and it seems quite compatible already, but might need a bit more optimization.
Ho yeah.
And that’s it for the (main) latest news.
As always, thanks a lot for your support! See you soon for the next one.
I say this for each blog post, but it’s been a reaaaally long time! Almost one year without writing here. A bad year for blog communication then, but on the bright side, it has been a good year for the developement.
Back To Zefyr
A nice hand painted title screen. And you don’t see it but it’s animated.
After working on & updating various little games for a while in 2020 & 2021 (mainly in order to get experience in marketing and releasing games), I spent 2022 working back full time on my main project “Zefyr, A Thief’s Melody”. And YES, that’s the new name! Actually, I’ve changed multiple times trying to find something that would fit all the requirements:
good description of the main game feel
easy to remember
easy to find on google/steam/whatever
no confusion with other game
no problem with legally registered trademarks
Believe it or not, it’s not that easy…
Game Update
First of all, I’m gonna talk about the visible part… Here’s some cool new stuff for the game:
I’ve been focusing on making the game main quest fully playable for people other than me. This includes creating quests & feedback to understand what happens, maps, dialogs, better level design and lot of signals & feedback to guide the player through the whole game.
I’ve upgraded some of the old-school textures thanks to material maker, and reworked some meshes & graphics
All islands are now visible from anywhere in the world
I’ve worked on a new title screen (you’ve seen it above)
Here are a few screens for you:
We can see very far away islands now. This adds to the openness and freedom feelingJust riding a turtle near Chapter 4…New sand texture & improved vegetation!A chase with a pirate ship.A boss with a life bar
And I’m currently testing it with a few super early testers. I can now say that somebody else finished the game. It’s been really interesting to see how new players react to everything in the game. It made me tweak and improve a lot of things.
Sadly, all upgrades are not as visible as the previous ones.
Dev Upgrades
In 2022, I’ve also upgraded the production pipeline of the game:
Newer versions of tools (Blender 3.X, Unity 2019 LTS, Material maker 1.0, Inkscape 1.0, Krita 5.X, Cinemachine…). That’s the problem of working on a project for a long time. You must have stable and not-too-outdated tools. It is not very visible to players but it is super important for me as a dev to always have healthy prod systems, easy to tweak and modify, with a solid base.
Change the AI from A* pathfinding back to native Unity pathfinding
Clean & strongly structure all the asset database to be able to easily update / fix problems
Big production clean: less code, more efficient, remove unused tags, easier to read and to navigate files
LOOOTS of bug fixes (between 1K & 2K)
Communication
I’ve started to learn stuff about communication:
I’ve created a “pro” presskit for online specialized press. You can check it out here.
I’ve started to post on reddit. I’m still very new to this; many posts were barely even seen, but one or two got their way to decent stats.
I also invested quite some time in my (French) youtube channel. I’ve been wanting to share my way of creating games for a long time, and this year I published ~10 videos mainly about graphics & dev logs. It’s in French, but the last ones have subtitles that can be translated by youtube. I’m particularly proud of that one and that one.
Sadly, you may have noticed it, but I was very bad at posting on my blog and patreon.
Coming in 2023
So what’s up for this new year ?
Last level: I must still work on the last level of the game which is still prototype.
Audio & Music: I have to make a big work on these
Side quests, polish & test: make the game shiiiiine and tweak all the little stuff that will make it lovely to play.
Lot of communication: social media, press, influencers, you name it, this year I must promote the game
Ideally, I would like to craft a few protos for my future games and see what’s worth it.
And that’s it for 2022! I wish you the best for this new year coming, and on my side, I’ll do my best to meet my goals with hopefully a release in Q1 2024 🤞.
I finally took the time to update my website! Now you can check all my games at once! Indeed, this year, I’ve worked on a few little games, and in the end, it’s starting to create a nice catalog. So don’t hesitate to take a look, and test them (most of them are free!). I hope you’ll like it 🙂
I’ve been really underwater lately! And I couldn’t even take the time to officially announce that Silent Night is now available!
It’s a game where you play as Santa and you deliver the presents during Christmas Night. You can ride the magic reindeers, explore procedural snowy islands and find the best route to maximize your score by triggering combos! You can get it on:
Don’t hesitate to test it, there’s a free demo available on both stores, and it’s perfect for the season. Of course you can buy the full version if you want to support my work!
After a few months of additionnal work on Slide – Animal Race, here is a MASSIVE update! I tried to listen to all the feedback you gave me. I hope you’ll like it!
Main improvements:
4 new tracks (Ocre Canyon, The Wave, Boreal Whales, Smooth Dunes) (10 tracks total)
2 new characters (Raccoon & Eagle) (8 animals total)
12 concurrents on each track
Relooking of minimap icons
New & more understandable victory screen with race timings
AI reworking for a better difficulty balance
A new track for the demo (Diplodocus Desert instead of Dragons of Aurora)
A WebGL demo build playable directly in your browser (limited & not as smooth as the desktop ones however, due to technical constraints) available on Itch.io
Other improvements:
Nice smoke FX in desert races
Sound & music rebalancing
Larger tracks for the difficult levels Pirate Cove & Dragons of Aurora
Fix lots of bad respawn bugs
Breakable lanterns in Lantern Festival
Readability improvements: black outline on animals, remove useless random FX, rework assets positioning on some tracks
Better gravity and orientation management during jumps
Nicer animal selection screen
Improvement of some animal models
Thin black line to separate each player subscreen
Slight gameplay adjustment on slowing grass, bombs & lightning
Polish on some feedback (slowing grass, lightning & speeder)
Many fixes & optimisations
Of course, it’s not finished, I plan to add more content in the future (tracks, animals, maybe game modes…).
But for now, the price stays the same!
You can check all this (new demo or full game) on Steam or Itch.io
If you like all this, don’t hesitate to leave a review on the stores, it helps a lot!
Peace!
As a bonus, here are a few screens of the updates:
