FLYING OAK GAMES

What have we been up to this week?

Happy Monday! Here's a joyous 57th ScourgeBringer open development newsletter issue.

Previously on ScourgeBringer: we fully implemented a mini boss and tweaked some feedback loop while Joonas was busy putting together a crazy concept some the main menu music.

Last week, we started to integrate our boss work into the game. We previously had all the pieces (including the boss music) ready here and there but we still had to merge everything making this to click correctly.

We haven't been using our boss editor for months, and trying to integrate everything proved that the tool still needed some polish and quality of life improvements in order to be efficient and easy enough to use. Florian had a bunch of requests to make his work through the editor faster and better, so I spent most of the week improving our tool. I was expecting to work on the super attack, but it was more important that I take all the necessary time to make the work of Florian easier in order to be productive on bosses.

So far it's turning up quite well. Florian has designed some of the base patterns, but note that it's still pretty rough and probably highly unbalanced. The idea is to design all kinds of patterns and then to fine tune everything through playtesting, see if everything clicks to players (and possible remove patterns or adjust his attack probabilities). Here's an editor preview.

While we were busy on bosses, Joonas continued his crazy work on the main menu music. He did an incredible multi-layered tune that dynamically changes every-single-time... Like, we could record it playing for 10 hours and it wouldn't probably never be the same (I could just record that and put it on youtube ahah). And if this wasn't enough, he added yet another layer of layers to make the music sound totally different when you're browsing the option menu, etc. Can't wait to share this!

This week, Florian is continuing to make boss animations and integrating them into a playable state within the game, while I'll be (hopefully) working on the super attack.

That's about it for today, see you next mission!

Cheers,
Thomas

P.S.: The 3 to 5 last issues had some wrong numbers in our budget (the number consumed weeks was wrong compared to the actual month-based value), it's all fixed now!

How is our budget doing?

Every week, we update our production budget based on our initial budget and our ongoing revenues.

ScourgeBringer budget is counted in "months of subsistence" instead of money. We believe that it is a more understandable way to explain how budgets are constructed and consumed.

Our remaining budget is: 8.44 months (36.70 weeks)*

• So far, we consumed -13.34 months (-58 weeks) from working of this project;
• And we consumed -1.22 months (-5.30 weeks) from investing (e.g. buying hardware, paying for services...);
• We also earned back +11.00 months (+47.83 weeks) from our ongoing revenues (e.g. NeuroVoider & Boo! Greedy Kid sales, contract work...).

Our initial budget for ScourgeBringer was 12 months when we started.

For a more detailed breakdown of our budget construction, you can refer to the first issue of this newsletter.
*1 week = 0.23 month (based on a 365-day year and a 7-day week)