These last few months have been a whirlwind of development for our tiny team at Studio Fawn.

After major setbacks with Bloom: Memories in core team members leaving and rebuilding under a new engine, it’s no secret we’d run into money troubles keeping us from continuing smoothly due to the longer dev time.

We had hoped the early peek of Memories with the Prelude demo would bring us in a little extra support…. but it just wasn’t far enough along to get much attention from media or enough to get publishers to help out.

This left us in a tricky situation. Though, as they say, “necessity is the mother of invention”.

So we decided to make a slight shift in our approach and re-purpose what we could for a smaller sister game to Memories. Taking this chance to expand on the core characters a bit, get a smaller game to market, and also keep improving the game features that could be transferred back to Memories.

Luckily the stage of the engine was plenty enough to support an action game (and actually we would need to scale back features, such as the various senses creatures have that drive their AI).

So, drawing on my fond memories of playing the classic game “Gauntlet” with my brother as kid…it seemed like a perfect fit for us to create.

And with that, we had our plan to create what we would call “Bloom: Labyrinth”.

It didn’t take too long for me to create a half dozen wall types and ground types, keeping to the classic feel of the game we were being inspired by. Or for me to take the models we had and re-render them into their sprites from a different perspective and add in some more animations to fit the new game.

After that, I set to work setting up creatures and abilities.

And of course creating a few custom rooms and other bits needed for the new game (icons, dialogue portraits, UI elements).

And that’s where we stand now after a few months trying to get Labyrinth done.

We still need to pull back some of the features that are bogging down the performance (Memories wasn’t made to support such high creature counts on a single map, as we need for Labyrinth). But hopefully we don’t run into too many problems the next month or two.

Overall, needing to take such a diversion from Memories to work Labyrinth isn’t so bad. The world and characters get a chance to be fleshed out a little more (even if it takes place in a dream, offering a unique chance to tell a story from inside a characters head)….and Memories will get a host of new features (such as the expanded spawner system we’ve done for Labyrinth, or the merchant upgrade).

Hopefully everything works out in the next couple months as we finish up and try to get back to Memories proper :)