Hey! people here at newgrounds! I haven't forgotten you!

I am still working on the game here is a little recap of the relevant stuff that happened this year so far!

You cant hear her but Rynn has a new voice actress. she is @HaruLuna

We got new assets for the ruins in march.

On april I worked on the interface and quality of life stuff

And ofc more forest assets :P

On may i put a new patron character design in the game, this character will appear on ACT2 (witch sadly is a little far away from development) You too can be a character in the game by joining my patreon for a time!

On June we got announced on steam!!

https://store.steampowered.com/widget/2370560/

Ofc on July we had a lot more content developed:

I got finished a side quest where you unlock the shop.

And also did more assets for the cave, this time some glowing crystals for ambience. They look so good!

On august i did some mushrooms for more decorations on the caves.

And at last i did a little new enemy!

So i hope you like all the deving i did and hope you are eager to wish-list the game on steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/widget/2370560/

btw if you wanna try a gimpise of the game, you can play the intro right now on itch.io!

https://raredoggu.itch.io/drakens-shrine

Hey people!, I know its weird for me to open commissions but there they are!

I had some bad luck recently and my laptop that I use to work, study and draw (a surface pro with pen and touchscreen) got stolen from my car and I'm trying to raise some money to get a replacement quick enough.

Here are the listings, because I lack a way to draw digitally I can't do backgrounds, big pixel art pieces or digital.

If you are interested you can contact me via a DM or better through my ko-fi page:

Commissions Open

You know, I am still working on the game and its not in danger, I work on the cloud so no data has been stolen or lost (I have updated all the passwords), but some arts I've been doing are half done just because I need at least a drawing tablet witch I dont have :(

Hey people!

Getting back to the grind, this lasts months were I slowly working on the game!

Here is a little briefing!

June

In june I mainly worked on backgrounds.

Worked also on revamping some enemy code because the action dynamic music system was bugging out when there were enemies constantly triggering the action sets.

July

Here I coded some trigger objects to change the background when transitioning, they also change the lighting and the weather effects. Good for when entering caves in the same level as outside stuff.

And also coded the chainbreakable solids.

This month also saw the release of the new patreon alpha:

Patreon exclusive alpha build

August

A new character joins the game.

She will be rescued by Rynn and become a traveling merchant.

September

And finally this month ive worked on a new optional boss that will give the player a costume skin!

So pretty intense 4 months!

So long people!

Twitter

Patreon

Hey people!

I am still alive, just that the past couple of months were pretty busy months and couldn't work on the game that much.

Im gonna make a summary of the best stuff from february to may!

February

In february I did some enemy variations for the forest level.

Also worked on the skin/clothing stuff for the player to change between the unlocked skins that will be avaiable, some will be patreon designed.

(The green character is Zoria a friend's character, this sprite was made for his birthday, I am using it here because there arent enough skins currently to test the engine).

March

In march i still was working on the clothing engine.

did start to make assets for it, this privacy screen will be the points where the player can choose to change skins.

I also worked on the new enemy deaths. because the new attacks are fire based now they will burn and dissapear. (easier to handle game wise :P)

April

In april I finished the attack graphics (i fyou compare it to the last gif you will notice it)

I also worked on new assets

new background (plants and dirt) and the grass.

also finished the clothing changing engine.

May

At the start of this month i worked on the swimming animations and more assets.

Those big blobs of leaves will have foreground and background some will dissapear as they are in front and obscure the player. Also I did a bunch of branch tiles for the giant forest.

Well thats it, its a summary, I did work on more stuff but this is the more important bits.

If by any chance you want to see more news check my Patreon page the monthly updates are free, and most others too, just the actual game builds and some polls are paid.

Thanks for reading!

And follow me on Twitter if you like this stuff!

January 2022 Update!

Happy new year everyone! I hope the first few days of the year went well!

I'm just slowly adapting to a new schedule to be honest and cleaning the house around. Also doing this patreon post pretty late on the 4th day of the month, like it seems is tradition in my devblog.

Also I have a confession. this past month of work was very slow or some weeks non existent, as I said, last month I was doing a coding Bootcamp at 42 Barcelona (a new kind of cursus that first started in France on 2013 I think.) This Bootcamp was very interesting. But I will leave the long version at the end of the post. 

Now go with me to discover what I did this past month bc even me I'm clueless.

I mostly spend the month doing a bunch of assets for the hut interior.

Still more to do, but this feels very good, because I also redid the wood textures to be more dark on the corners.

I'm also experimenting on how to do the interiors. having a black void felt very bad, so maybe would be nicer if I just put a normal background and some borders.

I did also change the water again. Seemed to have broken the past month even more, and was draining the game from fps, normally a room in the game has around 1000 real fps on my desktop and like 600 on my laptop, I wasn't too worried when the water shader just drained like 200 fps when underwater.

But when returning to develop the game a test on my desktop showed me that it was lowering the real fps from 1000 to 400 and to 200 on low spikes, even when not underwater, just having the water objects in the room.

So I just decided to remove the full shader, anyways it wasn't working all that well on the effect part neither. Had some clipping issues on one side.

And finally I got some new tracks for the game. can't share them because they are dynamic but right now the game has 3 tracks.

the main title, the underground caves, and the enchanted forest.

Now, let's talk about the Bootcamp.

They are called 42, bc the 42 number being the one that appears in the Hitchhiker guide to the galaxy novel. they had a lot of memes about that in the campus.

It was a 25 (normally 26 but due to the holidays they cut one day) days of pure learning with no stopping, no weekends, no rest, if you wanted you could stay there 24/7, but to be honest its a very draining experience so they recommend you to take breaks. 

I learned a lot about "C" language and Linux commands and other stuff, but all that was just a test, to see if you as an user could really take advantage of the cursus, because that place is free. no entry fee and no monthly payment or tuition. and in the end if you succeed you end with a programming level rivalling universities.

And the question is if I passed the test, and the response is...

YES!!!

I started the cursus on January 10th. and I'm pretty excited. It will be tough but not as nearly as the Bootcamp, it is more relaxed, after all nobody can be 24/7 just learning without a job or an income for nearly 3 years.

This experience to be honest just destroyed my dev and family routine. And I'm working on getting that back, Still not working as like before, but I'm at a good point after all those past months doing some back end stuff on the game, I' really expect this month to get some advancements that I can really show. and hopefully some new build with part of the forest working.

I just want to do the first quest where Rynn gets all her normal powers so you can play the game normally.

Oof, this was a long rant. sorry, well see ya soon!

Twitter link

Patreon link

December 2021 Update!

Hey hey people!

RareDoggu here, I am writing this from my laptop I am not home and wont be there almost all days because I am attending a coding bootcamp test, this program is to enter a full 3 year course on programming with lots of opportunities. And the bootcamp is very intense, it is open 24/7 for 25 days and we have to do lots of work.

Yesterday we had the first exam and was stressful and very cool, those are all test not real stuff but in the end of the 25 days they will evalue all the people and a lot of non coding factors kile teamwork and social skills too, seems like a good way to see who is really interested on the program and allowing people to learn in a non traditional enviroment.

Well stop that already! We gonna talk about the game, just a warning, probably this month of December I will be working very little in the game, I´ll try it tho to push some updates, mostly art I think because I will be burned of coding.

Starting with the Kiuna fight, it´s already finished, only need to think where to put her in the forest and write the scene and quest!

About other things, I was doing lots of art for K'thani´s house, and realized that I never coded any type of stairs (like the castlevania ones), basically a ramp that you can go through or climb depeding on the input.

Still some bugs to flesh out, like when turning around Rynn will fall through them. But basically works perfectly, you just have to be holding up when first hitting the stairs and it will trigger. It also detectsa if not only the feet are colliding so Rynn wont get stuck inside them.

I got an announcement also! I partnered with a producer that will help me finance the game!

Thanks to that I can get a musician that is very good and is apporting very much to the game. 

Check the audio in this youtube video:

I just got the first two songs. And the amazing thing is that we talked about making a dynamic music engine. The game will have a base music track, more calm and giving a better feel when exploring and platforming. Then when combat starts it will add layers that make the track more action oriented. Coding the engine was in theroy easy, but tewaking it to work well was a little harder, I had to revamp most of the sound engine I made before, because that only took into account a single track at a time, so when another music labeled sound started, the previous was fading out.

I was working on the tree tileset a lot, tbh its harder than I expected, and did lots of color and texture corrections.

And in the end test it with the lighting engine, I feel it works well but need lots of decor to work even better.

Now, because due to stuff happening irl, I've been missing some patreon rewards for you guys. 

So I will list them here as for december 2021  this are the current ones that are pending(the lined ones are complete):

• Background NPC: RaxTheHero, FarionFey, AlexanderRoper, Belblind, Omikron.
• Enemy: RaxTheHero, AlexanderRoper, JokerBoney(Big bunny boss), FarionFey.
• NPC and Quest: FarionFey(Quest pending), Belblind(Quest pending).
• Player costume/skin: No one (Tier too new).

Well and those are the people that have pending stuff, feel free to contact me (next mont a bunch of you that arent here will be here, you got to 6 months almost!)

Also, thank you all for your support I really appreciate your support! And also to thank those of you that booked some commisions from me last month when I had some financial trouble.

Patreon

Twitter

I'm making this update pretty late, I'm a little de phased after a programing Bootcamp. So here...

November 2021 Update!

The most important stuff this month was the backend work on experience gain and leveling up. 

There is still lots to do, because right now is only a bunch of numbers that don't really affect the game and I'm still internally debating on the proper level up progression system, like just stat upgrades, a wow like talent system or something else entirely?

Because I don't want the game progression be tied to leveling up, I like when you can get new abilities that will allow you to progress and unlocking new areas is not leveling up related.

Kiuna enters the fight! I spent most of this month doing her miniboss battle and she has the dash grab, the claw, the bloodshield and also she can summon bats.

Those bats bite so be careful you wont be thinking on hitting Kiuna while she is channeling.

To be honest this was a very difficult crack code wise, because of the physical interaction between 2 sprites. When I thought it was fine and dandy, and started doing other attacks or parts of the code, suddenly the grab stopped working or interacted weirdly, even if I was careful of not touching any of that code.

I've also been doing some more tileset work, still not happy how they are turning out lots of work to be done, it's incredibly time consuming to do that kind of asset. 

And of course, the last week as I said I had to diverge my focus on doing some work for other people, because I was really short on money due to unforeseen expenses.

Also I've been on a coding bootcamp trial, the whole month of December and a little bit of November. I'll explain in a few days on the December update.

Anyways, Lets hope everyone had a spooky Halloween and keep in touch!

Patreon!

Twitter!

October 2021 Update!

Well this month, let's see what has offered.

I started implementing the light engine on Rynn Fire attacks.

Was very weird because for some reason the first time testing them they didnt want to work propperly, and detached from the attack sprite,  but for some reason next day it worked fine without touching anything in the code, maybe some cache was messed up. anyways, the attacks are far from finished but at least the light works and looks cool!

(Don't mind the inmortal fireflies, they had no death code yet so they keep being a bother around).

I also started to conceptualize and make a list of the wild enemies (and others) that will appear in Act 1.

First I decided to take it easy and do a recolor of the wolf. That took me a while because a straight recolor to brown didn't look as good so I did some separation and shapes on the fur. 

Lazy :_)

To be honest I'm planning to change their behavior a little, like because the forest is haunted, they could be able to summon spirit wolves or something.

Other enemies that will reappear are the Empire soldiers, they wont be recolored.

Oh also, the Velvet worm will appear!

Do you remember them? they are the first Patreon enemy.

Other enemy ideas:

• Spiders.
• Birds/Bats.
• Plant based monsters.
• Ghosts/Undead.
• Bunny based enemies (Esquilax?)

(I'm very unimanigative coming up with good enemies).

I started redoing the water shader because of performance issues and i wanted to make the underwater effect a little different, but man, shaders are hard. I failed a lot trying to do them.

its using now a noise mask to make the distortion, but that makes it so that the size of the water object has a maximum size or it will deform.

When I managed to do it better the bottom and right edges were note cutting propperly and if I tried to do them better it would overlap. 

I managed to fine tune it so its minimum, still noticeable, i have to find a way to make it work, it would cut properly on the bottom but not the right side, so has this weird thing, im thinking it could be good to use less objects but make it so it draws all from that in long horizontal rectangles instead of squares.

I changed some tiers again and adding one new one. Some people suggested or asked for a way to support all tiers at once (like a max tier). That seems like a good idea.

And the Templar tier seems to be not that popular, I priced that tier based on the amount of work it would take me, because It's almost as redrawing all Rynn Sprites, so will be as hard as making an enemy and harder than an NPC. But seems that the real value of the tier is a little different, I understand people prefer to put their full character in the game instead of only make a player skin that Rynn would wear.

Anyways, here it goes the update. Well not all of it but I'm keeping the patreon Boss from showing until i feel comfortable talking more about her. but here is a sneak peek.

Bye for now

'<'

My Patreon

My Twitter

I totally forgot about posting my game updates here in newgrounds for months!, wtf.

I will put relevant stuff from months with the link to the full update

July 2021 Update!

I have to bring some attention at the lack of updates on twitter i was having, well since my drawing tablet work I got into making other stuff for the game like level design and thats pretty boring, but after I got it back I was doing a patron reward character that is pretty cool, not gonna spoil a lot onlu that she is Febria.

Some moody look, this is a very cool lighting engine use, I like fireflies flying around, but tbh my plan for the forest was to make it daylight with the fog i showed last month.

But is good to start adding critters, in theory the mini bats were critters bc they didn't fight back but were annoying, so I consider them enemies.

The last thing to show this month is the colapsable floors and platforms. 

It was something I had in the backburner for a while but never managed to work on them, tbh it was a pretty easy implementation. 

August 2021 Update!

I've did the swimming mechanics in the game, There was 3 types i was undecided on, all with advantages and disadvantages, so i made a poll and I hope you participated!

The winner was the "reverse mario" or buoyancy style wich makes Rynn float to the surface/ceiling if you dont push any buttons.

Now, what ive been doing this month too? maybe what it takes me more time to do, art :c.

Its fun to draw, tiles and sprites, but man, backgrounds are so time consuming, and ive been wanting to redo the forest bg after a long time doing the old one, because ingame it didn't feel good for me. so finally i have the new background!

September 2020 Update!

I made a cute Rynn dance

This month was also the birthday of a very good friend that is also doing a game.

I'm talking about @AllFenom.

I made a present for him.

(Dont mind the glichy gif, i had to compress it a lot)

Well finally, i got up to date, Probably in mid october I will post the October update (if I remember).

Remember my,

Twitter

Patreon

June 2021 Update!

Hey people!

How is it going, I'm fine but this month I had a disaster struck me, you see, my tablet (Surface pro 4) that I use for drawing was doing weird stuff for months, always needed to be connected to power and after 2 hours of work it went a little crazy, was overheating and the screen really made weird stuff making it impossible to use.

I was still using it here and there when I really needed it to draw big stuff, like the backgrounds or character pieces. But last week it went full crazy, no 2 hours of use even, just doing its thing on turn on. So I sent it to a repair shop hoping they can fix it, if not it will be like 650€ to change it for a new model from microsoft (at least I would save something compared to buying a new one).

Oof

did a dance for Rynn, took me a while but I think it looks cute, still I think I will put another simplier one.

Started on some story in ACT 1 where Rynn got rescued by kthani.

I will make Rynn to wear rags instead of her normal equippment so the first game quest will be getting them back.

This made me redo some stuff, like how the sprites of the player is handled, inlcuding the portrait, now there is a stored state machine that handles all that, so I dont have to get preoccupied on messing up the sprite selection and everything is in one place.

Before, Rynn was 2 objects (well still is 2 objects) One for the prologue where her abilites are limited and she only uses the sword and the normal player object that can be anything i wanted.

This also made me think of a cool concept, where I can change Rynn's clothes for rewards ingame, or even maybe put some new tier reward for Patrons where they can decide a costume to wear? idk, I'm still thinking of it.

Could be cool.

Also I started working on the new attack chain combo, this will have a 3 combo chain, and tho it took me a while I got a "procedural" (ugly word) combo, so i can add more attacks after.

I don't know if these attacks are too quick, but well they are the same speed as the sword ones so gameplay first I suppose, not like I want the game to play slower.

I started also to play with the weather engine I developed (the snow was part of) and put a fog weather effect, still wip (I'm not happy with the color because looks like dust) the forest is impregnated in an ochre coloured fog.

I think maybe the fog having a more orange/yellow color could work?

The last thing I worked this month was the Tile transparency system. I wanted this to work much earlier because all the games have secret treasure rooms, cool hidden areas or even houses/buildings that don't require to use a door transition.

As you see I had a graphic's glitch with that. The tiles had black pixels where they were supposed to be transparent.

The issue is that somehow in Gamemaker studio 2 this looks very weird, and the method I found was for gms1.4 and converting that to gms2 was very taxing on performance (looking constantly for every tile if it needs to be transparent or not), but turns out there was a function that was easier to do just that dealt with shaders, and I had to write a shader for that (idk shader coding is scary) It was a simple one but still for my coding level shaders are like a black box. 

In the end it work flawlessly (hurray!)

As a last thing, I did change a bit how the patreon rewards work, and i got a new one up and running!

All my patrons deseve my love! really any ammount helps I just want to archive my dream of being a game dev and tell cool stories. And all those people are helping me do it!

On closing thoughts:

-I need revamp of the dialogue code, idk it seems something minor but when I was working on a birthday present (Happy birthday again Minirop!) I noticed an issue with the portraits in the dialogue, I made them modular so I can change the expressions on the characters, but I realized the system didn't allow expressions when talking, or even Idle ones when not talking for the mouths.

-Still working on tiles for the forest, and I fear when I have to do the decorations, I am very bad at that part of pixel art and I always get stuck thinking what stuff could be used for decorations.

-My tablet is busted so no big drawings for the time being until I get it back (I'm bad at mouse drawing pixel art). It's sad because another patron got the NPC reward, and we started discussing the character, and it's a really awesome one, I can't wait to start drawing her!

Cheers luvs!