Developer's Log: The Bee's Knees! 9.19.20

With a little over a month to our Kickstarter, the Workshop has been chugging away harder than ever! Read on to get the latest updates on our pipelines, creative bouts, and recent changes to the demo!

Art Pipeline Updates - Lilly

Hey there Toons! Things have been busy working on the RPG, so here are some fun updates for you all! We’ve been continuing to create assets and finishing up the recent art pipeline overhaul. With the installation of the animation pipeline, we’ve been able to focus on getting animated character cards in addition to refining the concept art for our exisiting characters!

Writing Pipeline Updates - Kal

Hey hey toon friends! Our writing team is just about done with our second round of assignments and we’ve been absolutely blown away by the creativity that has been poured into this project. Our writers have gone above and beyond and we couldn’t be more excited! Here’s what we’ve been up to the last few weeks:

• Wrapping up the Character Design Pipeline, where our writers wrote detailed documentation for our overworld characters.
• Rewriting and editing the Kickstarter landing page to ensure it is absolutely top quality!
• Vaughn and I have been busy preparing the third and final draft of the main script for reading and editing.
• Encouraging daily discussion between our writers by posting a “Question of the Day”, which as you can see, often results in a plethora of puns and jokes between the team. The latest: a certain fixation on… bees, of all things!

Our team is working harder and closer together than ever, and you can expect to keep seeing great things from the writers of Monochrome Workshop!

Demo Updates

Development for the Monochrome RPG has been going well. Our dev team has continued to improve and test out the different types of Stage Bouts! In addition to this, the narrative dialogue system has been in a recent overhaul. This means that dialogue between Otto and overworld characters will be even better! Recently, tweaks have been made to improve interactions between Otto and his furniture in his house during the first portion of gameplay. The team has also begun adding “barks”, which function as little messages that characters can blurt out at any moment! This helps with the overall world building and ambiance of the game.

We’ve been preparing for the Kickstarter by focusing on features of the game that will be in the trailer, specifically:

Bout <-> Overworld – Now that the Bouts have their base design, we need to tie the Overworld to the Bouts so Otto can enter a Bout when he encounters an actor or another troupe.

Items/Inventory – Otto needs to be able to collect items in the overworld and have them when he enters a bout.

Troupe Management – Otto needs to be able to select his troupe members before entering a bout. Luckily he can do so on the fly (pun intended)! If Otto sees a buzzer he’s going to want a Music-type Troupe member ready to help him out.

Dialogue – We want to showcase some of the awesome writing and silly puns so we have been adding in all the main story dialogue and all the different NPCs dialogue

Kickstarter Sneak Peak!

Here’s a look at the super cool merch items that we’ll be offering during our Kickstarter campaign: posters in typical 1920’s cartoon fashion, pins, plushes, and so much more!

We have so many exciting things planned for the Kickstarter and this is just barely the tip of the iceberg! Make sure to stay up to date and get notified when our campaign goes livee, and follow us on Twitter for news and regular art features!