A new development diary for Luckless Seven explains how the day/night cycle will work.

Dev Diary #56: Time For Change

30 May @ 1:38am - REALLY REALLY RED PANDA

I think it’s time for a change.

More specifically, I mean a change in the time of day.

For Neropolis City, we have been working on a small day/night cycle for the new environments in the area. Since players will be spending a much longer time in Neropolis compared to the last city, we wanted to explicitly show the passage of time.


More about Sunset Environments and Dialogue UI Prototypes Below!

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We now have a sunset version for every outdoor area in Neropolis. Water is very abundant around Neropolis, and the changing reflections make for a very different vibe!


Version 1: Accidental Kool-Aid River.


Version 2: Accidental Fanta Sea. Thank you so much to r/indiegames for the detailed, constructive feedback on our sunset environments.


Version 3: Might need a bit more color. What do you think? (The water and foam are more transparent and water reflections are pink)

Join the Luckless Seven Discord[discordapp.com]!

Overall, we’re really happy with how the water is looking in the sunset scenes. The design of the city provides us with a good opportunity to show off the game’s lighting and water effects. We’ll be taking another pass at the reflections to make the water look a bit less uniformly orange.

In our last update "Dev Diary #55: The Write Stuff[www.deckpointstudio.com]" we showed off this very work-in-progress animation. For those who guessed, it is a new walking animation! This new walking animation is only used in certain story segments.


What happens in the story to use this new walking animation?! Well, you'll just have to play to find out! ;]

But the tides aren’t the only thing changing. In the near future, we have plans to do a revamp on our UI. The graphics for our environments have improved over the years, but we still have some legacy UI that was created back in 2014/2015 (wow, it’s been a long time!). We want an interface as polished as the world. But it’s not just appearances: these changes will also lead to better performance. We should have a lot more to share with you in the coming devlogs.


Join our mailing list to stay up-to-date! We will send out emails once a month with a summary of our weekly devlogs.


New dialog UI Prototype that we're working on. This will enlarge/fullscreen the talking character. We are very likely to move the smaller portraits around and also shift the response/choice menu so there is no overlap.

As always, if you have any questions about how we tell the story, leave us a comment or join the conversation in our L7 Discord![discordapp.com] We love questions and feedback.

Until next time,

Jonathan

News and demo for the Narrative-Driven Card RPG Luckless Seven:

New Menu and More

Hello everyone!

Today, I’m writing to share the news about a lot of positive changes we’re making to the every-session and early-game experience of playing Luckless Seven.

Let’s talk about the every-session experience of playing Luckless Seven. There are certain things that you’ll encounter every time you boot up the game. Interactive dialogue. Open world movement. Ekosi.

Ekosi’s a big one. It’s at the center of gameplay, so we want incorporate player feedback as much as possible in improving it. We learned two contrasting things from demoing the game at OGDE. On one hand, several players felt that the Ekosi tutorials at the beginning of the game were overbearing and too text-heavy. On the other hand, some players had trouble understanding the game and had questions after the tutorial was finished.

Another segment of the game you’ll encounter every time you play Luckless Seven is the start menu. It’s easy to overlook, but this is both your introduction to the game and every play session. So, we want to get it right! Functionally, the menu should allow players to start or resume a playthrough of Story Mode, jump into Arcade Mode for instant Ekosi action, or modify game settings.

Since we’re on the subject of character, it wouldn’t be a Luckless Seven update without discussing new portraits. My job as the game’s writer is to create characters through story design and dialogue. And dialogue can do a lot, but the right portrait can do so much to express the emotions and thoughts of our characters. So it’s important that we have the right portraits for every moment. Accordingly, our amazing artist Emma is currently working to expand the range of portraits for our main cast members.

But she’s not just treading over old territory. In addition to creating main cast portraits, she’s working on entirely new portraits like the exciting one below.

You’ll get to see this character come to life when we’re finished revising Day 1 of gameplay. For now, you can look forward to the new start menu, the Ekosi guide, more portraits, and a handful of improvements to user experience. We’ve added two new cursors: a semi-transparent magnifying glass and a chat bubble mouse cursors that show if Mark is too far away to talk to a person or activate a door. Along with that change, we’ve introduced a feature that will initiate auto run when players click on door buttons that are too far away to enter.

To try these changes out for yourself, you can download Demo 0.654 at our IndieDB page.

As always, we welcome your feedback, fresh ideas, and general enthusiasm. They’ve brought the project this far, and we have no intention of stopping now. Keep an eye on our IndieDB page for updated demos, as we’ll only be announcing major releases in our Kickstarter posts.

Until next time!

Tyler