Greetings!
Time to check in this month with all the adventures we've been up to in April at Broken Hammer. I hope April has been a good month for you as well.
It sure didn't end the way we had expected. We knew Muse was launching Guns of Icarus on PS4 at the start of May. But we didn't know we'd have an opportunity to promote Dust and Air on their release stream. We really can't thank them enough for allowing us to take some time slots.
Those that tuned in for it, apologies for our messy stream overlay. We literally got the package to set that up two days before. However we put it off to do a last minute scramble on a new demo and planning the stream segments. There wasn't much time to really set things up properly. Although Faith got to work on it for her segment and it came out quite nice.
She's much more experienced with streaming than some of the rest of us. Had we had a bit more time, we could have worked a bit more with her to set ours up better.
If you managed to stay on for our late night stream, we did a play through a new alpha build and also revealed the opening sequence to Day Two.
While we certainly didn't plan on doing a full stream play test like that, we wanted to help Muse fill some time slots.
Tuesday isn't always the best day for schedules. Finding people able to stream and getting last minute events set up can be rough. Thankfully some of our team was free and able to be there so we could help them fill some segments.
We really appreciate Muse a lot and are glad to be able to showcase how wonderful they have been to growing the GOIO community. Their continued support of fan created projects is very encouraging.
Before all of this, much of our month was spent doing overhauls on the Neutral Arc. In fact in a way, the stream happening when it did was pretty good. We had just finished up that work and had the work in a ready to go to testing state.
Granted during the play through, we saw some bugs and areas to fix. But the largest chunk of work was completed. So it won't take long to implement those fixes.
Also during this month we had a full play test meeting with Gimmen to really hash out some new music theme ideas. It was the first of many as we begin our overhaul of the music. To start we took Day One and really compiled a lot of notes on potential theme ideas and changes. We'll do the same for every day of the story.
On the art side of things, Faith showcased some more decal images during her stream on Muse's event. She also drew a concept image for Grace and Nakiri that we'll post here for those that didn't catch the stream. She literally drew this within an hour for the viewers:
Grace is Abigail's mother. She's in the front. Nakiri is in the back.
While we have some concept art on her, we didn't have any colorized art.
Grace is in the medical field in Chaladon.
While Abigail may be more reserved as a character, Grace is very animated and open.
Nakiri as we've listed on our site, is the heroine of the Arashi arc.
We've had some color shots of her in the past. Just not too many.
Unfortunately we won't be seeing her till the story arcs.
But it's good to keep concepts of her coming.
When Georgy finally gets to her, he should have plenty of references.
Speaking of Georgy, his graduation should be taking place soon. We're looking forward to him completing his degree. He has juggled quite the schedule to bring us so far within the last year. Even churning out Calle models and key images while finishing up his final semester.
Also another graduation that just happened was for Cody, one of our musicians as he just finished up his degree and is now moving on to another school to get his masters. He did rather well. Got some great honors.
That said, our internal goal is to release the NA later this year. Which means our summer will be busy. Both Georgy and Cody will be getting more freed up.
This month of May looks to be a great prep month for our big summer content push. I'll be looking forward to bringing you our monthly update when the time comes. While I doubt we'll be doing more spontaneous streams like we started May with, we'll hopefully get better lead time next time that happens.
Till then, see you in the skies!