Oh, little Ottl. This scamp's cute face might look familiar to some players. Ottl's actually been soft-revealed for a few months. It appears in the promotional artwork for the game's Steam page on top of Coondling.
Ottl is a Water-type that's known for its curiosity. Sometimes its curiosity gets it into trouble. It likes shiny things, and will often swat at the bulb of an unamused Anglow. Being a Water-type, Ottl doesn't like the ensuing shock. I mentioned last week that the game has conditions for evolution. I wonder what would happen if Ottl were to take too many Lightning-type attacks? Would you risk your Ottl taking a 2x effective move if it meant it might evolve for it?
I mentioned in the Flochness blog that my father had a hand in designing its pre-evolution. However, Ottl is the first design that can be completely chalked up to someone else: my wonderful girlfriend, who's in charge of the game's promotional art that debuted it. I still drew and animated it for the game to fit its style, but she did the concept art and design for both Ottl and its evolution. I'm really happy with this little guy.
This week, I spent a LOT of time reworking the intro tutorial/cutscene to the game. After watching people play the demo both in-person and on YouTube, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't satisfied with the intro's pacing. Meeting Ioti in the forest seemed fine, but problems arose when the player met Rambush and was hit with a wall of expository text.
I decided to trim a lot of the fluff out of the dialogue. But, more importantly, after Rambush destroys the Soul Statue, he now says this:
Rambush, not yet convinced that you're the light spirit, has you go through The Lost Mountain before detailing anything. This way, there is far, far less downtime in between gameplay.
When you get to the first area, Ioti now issues you a line about how smokes kill but wilds don't:
Then, the cutscene unfolds as normal (but with far fewer lines), just in the first town instead of The Lost Mountain. The player enters their team's information, then they're off to the races!
Certain cutscenes were even reworked to fit the new locale.
It was an arduous job changing everything up, but it had to be done. That's been the better part of my week, but in terms of Abomis, I'm now at 73/100. I'm assuming that next week, I'll be at the illustrious 75%.
I'll see you then,
Carl