It’s been a little while since our last blog post, but we by no means have just been twiddling our thumbs this whole time! In fact, we’ve been fairly busy during this past fall, and this DevBlog will be all about what’s been going on with us since our last update. A huge thanks you to everyone who has been sticking along with us so far and we hope that the things we’ve been planning behind the scenes will eventually be all worth our absence!
Before we begin, just a usual friendly reminder for you to join our Discord server! It is the easiest way to stay up to date with the recent twists and turns of the development and you’ll get a chance to try the game early combined with other perks only for our Discord members. :)
Join our discord to support and hear about launch info early!
And now let’s jump into it and check how everyone on our team has been doing!
NOORA
What a crazy past few months it has been! Going through all the details seems impossible since there’s been so much work that we’ve done since our last post. There have been some reworks happening and then we crunched together a completely new level. There are still a lot of visual fixes that need to be done but overall it’s okay. I’ve been making a lot of animations mainly for the new enemies and we have been developing the visual aspects of the “common theme” of all the enemies. But that’s something we’ll continue to work on still. Here’s a small gif of the toad enemy and its tongue attack!
Currently, we’re working towards moving the whole project to Unreal Engine 5 and it’s a chance for us to clean up the project and fine-tune some designs and our overall workflow, which I’m pretty excited about even though it’s going to be a lot of work for sure. For this whole transition, I’ve been writing documents about the pipeline when it comes to art, some optimization stuff, and naming conventions so that when we start moving everything we can do it correctly.
TIPI
So many things have happened during this autumn that it is really hard to choose where to begin. I believe that some have noticed that the demo is no longer available on Steam. From now on we share the key to the updated version of it on our discord only upon request. :) This probably indicates that something has been cooking and that is true.
Behind the scenes, the team has been working like crazy to get the new map done, bossfight done, improved mechanics, improved parkour, improved everything pretty much.
I myself have been running around events talking to people about the game and just trying to get Arrival of the Punnu out there. A lot of people have been really interested in the game and praised how awesome it looks! Which I totally agree with, it is stunning and it has been a pleasure to present it.
I have dived deep into the world of Narrative Design and am trying to learn more and more to get the story implementation and everything right. We have also decided to update to Unreal 5 so that means that a lot of the stuff we’ve done so far will be remade to a better, improved version. This gives me an opportunity to revisit the design and work harder to get everything right. I want to have the Punnu and Boy interacting more, bring the world more alive and relay the liveliness of our world through the game as well.
This autumn has taught me a lot about how to talk to various professionals across the industry and also I have expanded my network within the industry even wider. I have to relay a massive thanks here to Baltic Explorers and LGIN who have enabled so much new growth for our little studio and helped in creating the really valuable networks we now have.
I have been so proud of this team and the people I have the privilege of working with. Even though there have been a lot of difficult issues to handle and a lot of turmoil going on, I still feel lucky to be on this journey.
We now have big plans and major things coming up with Arrival of the Punnu and I am so excited to get my hands dirty with design and really looking forward to all the challenges ahead!
MIKKO
Our first true indie crunch is over now and we have a playable prototype with 3 levels and most of that will be reworked in the coming months. There are a ton of bugs to squash, gameplay weirdness, and one very derpy boss fight. But hey that’s what you’ll get when you try to rush an entire level in a few weeks with a skeleton crew. But as bug-infested as it currently is, the game is playable and even fun on some occasions. Lots of new features were quickly implemented including wall-jumping, enemies, tons of animations, and a boss fight. Those systems and a few older ones will be completely overhauled as we move the project to Unreal Engine 5 next. I’m personally very excited to finally be able to make old systems smarter and more robust. Let’s hope we have enough time for all that before jumping into the next new features.
NOORA
At the same time, I started working on a AAA customer project on Unreal which has been super cool. It’s been great to see the workflow in a bigger project and how everything has been set up and organized. I’ve also learned a bunch of new stuff in the past few months and I’ve had a chance to work with some amazing and skilled people. Can’t wait for this project to be announced!
MIKKO My personal work on our project was on hold for a few months as I started working on an AAA-project for our customer on Unreal. We’re told to keep quiet about the project until some time next year but I can say this: it’s going to be awesome.
Working on a huge project was certainly a culture shock at first. Making a simple change in code takes no longer than in a small project but making sure you don’t break anything and actually testing your code takes enormous amounts of time. I’ve spent several days staring at the screen while my PC is being held hostage by Unreal's packaging process. Even though my personal progress is slow on the project I’ve managed to learn more in the past few months than I ever thought possible. Looking forward to next year when we are finally able to reveal what we have been working on.
That's it for this time! We are really hoping to see you here next month as we continue our development and adventure!
With best regards,
Punnu Game Team
