A new month, a new dev log! April has been a busy one for us at Frolic Labs, and there's lots going on. While we were making a lot of technical improvements, our designers have been pushing on new contents, with much more to come on the upcoming weeks. The game itself is coming along nicely, although some things take longer to achieve.

New content

Major effort was made on creating the new content and new game levels. Up until recently we only had one level we called 'Section One', and now we added the brand new one: 'Section Two'. The entire Section 2 debuts in a recent dev build and will be added to the Alpha build soon.

Our roadmap for the content has a total of 5 sections for the game, so there is still a long way to go.

Difficulty Balancing

We constantly iterate on our existing levels in order to balance the difficulty - this is an ongoing effort to make the gameplay more fluent and the flight navigation interesting and challenging enough without being overly hard on novice players. Finding the right balance requires getting more feedback from players. Thanks to the support of the our testers and the feedback they give us, this part would likely to improve throughout the development.

Part of that is in the level elements, like obstacles and props - and making sure they are passable for average skill level. Another part is the flight model of the bird character. We introduced an improved flight model, with better response and ability to quickly pull up from a glide while flying low.

Scene Lighting Progress

A lot of effort went into streamlining and upgrading the lighting in the game. As opposed to a single static setting, we wanted to have different lighting profiles attached to different areas in the game. To that effect, we built a system that loads a new profile when a new section of the level gets loaded. This allows for a better flexibility for the designer who is able to control wide array of parameters like sun color, sky gradient colors and sun position.

We recently integrated a time-of-day system from the asset store to provide an easy way to control a day / night cycle throughout the game. Some of that is still upcoming, but we can already get better results on current builds. With the help of Unity's Post processing stack (v2) we were able to use some of the post effects and spend time on boosting render quality of our different scenes.

Play Testing

This month we launched early Alpha of Dune Sea, and got a handful of play-testers providing us with valuable feedback. Rolling out Alpha has been slow in pace, and getting players to test the game proved much harder than we expected.

While all of us are busy with actual development, we are still very active on social media, constantly posting on Discord and hyping the game. Growing our community of play testers is an important goal that we plan putting more efforts into, and possibly seek help and add a dedicated promoter to the team.

To that end, we will be showing the game at a few local events here in Toronto to get more exposure. Be sure to check our twitter feed for more details on that.

If you like to support us, you can join our Discord channel and sign up for play-testing.

Upcoming

Here is a short list of upcoming features and updates to expect for the next month.

Updated animation for the bird character

All new camera system for smoother action

New music tracks

Additional non player characters

That's about it. We will be working hard on evolving Dune Sea until the next time. You can keep up to date with all our goings-on on our Discord channel and on Twitter.