This month I’d like to share a progress report on all facets of Exit’s development. Our current goal is to finish and post for all of you a ‘vertical slice’ of the game, a small demo build that would show off a little bit of everything from gameplay to presentation. We wanted to have this ready for this month, but unfortunately there’s been a delay due to some IRL issues and the programmers deciding to ‘take another look into refactoring the code to undo some retarded decisions’. Nevertheless, we owe lots of progress updates, so here is the current state of Exit’s development.

Story

The first draft of the big chunk of the story we’re working on was finished last year, and for the most part holds up well. We began the second draft at the start of the month with a list of things that needed changing, and are nearly finished. One main focus is to keep the characterization between Morgan’s inner council consistent, for example keeping Second Self as the ‘jester’ and Social Accounting as a lot more socially careful, the two are a bit of a duo in this way. Vigor specifically was originally a much quieter character that gave strict, simply worded commands as opposed to the violent, fearful, genocidal tendencies of Morgan made personified, and with the changes he has much more character. Standards for storytelling in Cavemanon are as high as ever, and we make sure to always be our own best critics to make our best story yet.

Music

Things are beginning to pick up a lot in the music department. We’ll be able to show off more as we go along, but we want to have a focus on leitmotifs and a distinction between the small town tracks and the downtown tracks, make the effort to really distinguish these two halves of the game.

Art & Design

For this section I’d like to start with two smaller developments followed by something with a bit more meat to it. Firstly, with the help of anons providing their own anecdotes and stories about their small town life as well as our own research, we’ve been able to overhaul the old map we had in mind for something that fits all of our needs. Focus for the town will be very vibe-based, we want it to be an accurate setting that can be appropriately naturally beautiful and somber.

Currently however our efforts are focused on level design, which we will have more to speak on later. The second small update is a proposal from one of our artists to change the design for Social Accounting, as you can see here. Please let us know in the comments what you think!

Background-wise, the artist has been doing his best to improve his skill in both speed and quality of his work. We will have a whole lot of these to go through, so it’s great that we’re able to get them at a decent speed.

Finally, onto something I think you will all enjoy. When coming up with the battle system, we’ve been wanting to ‘find the fun’ and have been designing moves with the players’ input in mind. These are all still untested concepts, which is where (YOU) will come in soon enough to tell us if our crap stinks. For the time being though, here’s a couple video demonstrations of what we’re working on:

To wrap up the development on art, I’m happy to disclose that we have new beta assets for every party members’ walking and running cycles, overworld idle sprites, and general battle spritesets, as well as at least one move each. Coming next month we hope to be able to focus our efforts much more on level design and enemies.

Finally, we’d like to mention that we are on the lookout for an addition to our programming team. If you know someone that would be a good fit for our team, please consider letting them know. Here’s a statement from our lead programmer on the subject:

We’re welcome to beginners, novices, and hobbyists to help fill out our team, but this requirement isn’t necessary. The fundamentals of programming are necessary however. Familiarity with game engines, especially Godot, are great traits.

If you need a measuring stick to compare the skill of yourself or someone you know to what we need, a good test question would be:
“Can you get a small coding project completed and in a usable state? A useable state would be if a technically competent person, who has a manual for the tool, could figure out your tool and get use out of it.”

A programmer should know if they can do this or not. If you think you can, or are on the fence if you can, send your portfolio to cavemanongames@gmail.com. We value proof of capability, so make sure to bring your code.

Thank you for your time reading this today, as mentioned our top priority with Exit right now is getting that playable vertical slice for all of you. Progress is going good recently, I cannot wait to be able to show it off to all of you who have been so patient with us. Please let us know what you think in the comments!