Well, that was alpha! The game is playable start to finish. With “finish” being an NPC who tells you you’ve finished and can exit the game now if you want. It’s definitely starting to feel a lot more like we can do this. There’s a pretty clear progression of difficulty through the areas, and even with a few enemies being a little bit unpolished at the moment, you can figure out how each of them is behaving if you hang around one of them long enough. Finalized art for them is definitely really going to make them feel real, as is finalized art for the environments. There’s a lot of grey box rooms right now, but at least that’s enough to start running Florida through QA.

Over break, I spent a lot of time working though the sounds that the game is still going to need, and making a finalized asset list. Having that, I think I’ve collected the vast majority of the sound samples that I’ll need to finish them. It involved a lot of running around my house to find the right two objects to bang together. This is definitely going to make the game feel much more alive once they’re complete, as there isn’t a tremendous amount of feedback anywhere outside of the sewers. With all the sound assets done, finding the appropriate clip for each action and editing it to sound right is all that needs to be done for the remaining sounds. They’re definitely going to start moving a lot faster.

I also took on the task of writing out the actual concrete NPC lines that will comprise the final game narrative. We’ve spent a lot of time building different outlines, and I just decided to make myself accountable for putting it all together. It’s a little daunting. I’ve already got some pretty fun ideas for the actual NPCs themselves:

• Sigfried the rhinoceros, a Marlon-Brando-esque mob boss who sends the player on their quest to fight the final boss of Neon Pompeii. I’m thinking the player will start with the impression that he’s the boss, before learning that he also loves frogs.
• Cassandra the flying squirrel, an NPC fond of high places in Florida who teaches the player the Hover and Parry moves, provided the player can get to her location.
• Eddie, a mob agent that the player first meets in the sewers, but later misleads them into thinking Sigfried is the one stealing their frogs.

I think these should be pretty fun. I’m excited to see what the artists come up with for them once I finish writing.