Ping - 2026.14 - One Final Ping, and It's a Good Thing
Hello everyone!
As usual, time has come for us to share the updates. Despite a lot of work being done on Don't Follow the Butterfly, an ongoing work on Princess Asurja's Morning re-release, and good progress on Dreams of Space (I have not even announced this one, and maybe shouldn't have done it now), there is very little to report.
The reason for that is very simple -- most of the work happening now is purely technical, and for the foreseeable future -- it will be.
Don't Follow the Butterfly
The game is fully completable, but is far from completion. There is a huge list of issues ranging from small technical issues like invalid area transitions to entirely skipped portions of lore and story.
We have finally implemented a well-working alchemy system that I really like (we'll record a demo some time in April), but we'll need to add actual substance to it -- while we planned it, currently we have only a few usages for it.
Most of the work in front of us is either purely technical and there is very little to demo or lore-related and sharing it would be a spoiler.
Bringing the game together took a lot more time than expected, mostly because I was resolving the critical issues encountered at the same time, and there were quite some: originally I implemented alchemy in a very simplistic way, as a typical inventory puzzle, however this led to a few issues between chapters, for example allowing player to stockpile resources they were not expected, a lot of effort was put into implementing a ritual room in one of the chapters. Telling more would be a spoiler, but it's pretty central to the chapter, so has to work properly.
Princess Asurja's Morning
Yes, we're going to re-release it. Translated to English, with cover art and a custom theme.
I'm not sure why I only thought of this now, since it's a neat little game
Awakening
Yes, we're going to re-release it. Translated to English, with cover art, a custom theme and tolerable graphics (only going to replace what's in the game, not adding anything).
This was planned, postponed, cancelled and re-planned a thousand times. Now that we've finally announced that we're going to work on a remake, it's also time to give the original the care it deserves, to keep it available as a historical reference.
Dreams of Space
I'm still pretty hesitant to sharing this, but yes, I'm working on a musical piece that I intend to release either closer to the end of the year or the next year.
There's not really much to say, except...
Among the shadows I am drifting,
A remnant of the time long past
An empty whisper of the ages fading,
A ghost, a vision slowly crumbling to gray dust
End of Pings
Pings were intended as a form of regular update, showing that we're still here and still active. And they, kinda, serve the purpose. But, on the other hand I don't think there is any value in monthly posts on how we have done nothing again. Essentially it's just taking our time to write them and yours to read them. At the same time, in the nearest time we have quite some releases planned.
So, instead of spamming the feed with useless repetitive Pings, we are going to:
- Add a projects page to list all our active and planned projects
- Write meaningful posts -- demos, articles, archive additions. I'm thinking about writing some opinionated articles on various gaming and tech related topics, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do this or not
- A yearly report will still happen, as a summary and for the announcement of changes
Thank you for your attention! Until we meet again!
As always we are waiting for your feedback by mail