It's the end of 2023, Happy Holidays! What a year it's been; between game development, fulfilling backer rewards, merchandise, our normal day jobs, and our own personal lives, it's been a rollercoaster. 

We want to start off by saying thank you to everyone that has been supporting us this year; those who have only recently found our development, those looking forward to our updates, or even those just sticking along for the ride. To commemorate us making it through this year, please enjoy this new, appropriately rainy illustration!

Merchandise Milestone and Updates:

First up, Kickstarter merchandise. We can finally say that, other than a few noted exceptions, all of our physical merchandise rewards have been shipped!!! It feels amazing to have reached this milestone after so much effort and patience from the people supporting us!

While it's not a core part of the development of the game, the team worked really hard on these and are incredibly proud of how all the merchandise turned out, so we'd like to share a few pictures of our own. 

With that, this part of our campaign is now complete! Thank you to everyone who sent in messages, posted comments, or shared pictures of their rewards. We're ecstatic to see people enjoying their rewards, and knowing all the items made their way to you safely was such a relief! (Especially Shikama who ended up winning the "Backer's favourite merch" betting pool.)

What About Future Physical Merch Availability?

The above question is one we've received a few times now and would like to address. While we originally had no plans for merch outside of Kickstarter due to our high minimum order thresholds and the time commitment, you've asked and we're still listening! Availability will heavily depend on interest.

If you, or someone you know, are interested in the physical merch, please carefully read through and fill out the linked form below so we can understand if there is enough interest for a future opening.

If we do have further merch openings, please know that those specific orders will only be shipped AFTER game release as we are prioritizing game development.

The Survey will close January 31, 2024.

Development Summary Updates:

We've made good progress on the game this year too! Even though we are a little behind schedule (due in part to the merchandise saga we went through), we can happily say we are about 30% of the way through development! 

This year, we mainly focused on front-ending the components to create our story/narrative. A lot of our individual components tell a story themselves beyond the written text, so we wanted to put aside time to craft those (and their stories) properly first.

MUSIC 

If you thought we had a fulsome soundtrack in the demo already, you will be surprised to hear that our list of tracks currently number up to 22+. This OST is shaping up to be quite hefty overall. Here's a really quick cross-section to round up some of the music we've been working on this year.

Something we don't really talk about/highlight about our development - but is integral and has been in place since the mini demo - are the themes in most tracks as well as their variations throughout the OST. Our game actually has quite a few of them with more to come! 

Did you know that the main menu track is the same melody progression as the track that plays in the art gallery scene, which is ALSO the same as the track that plays in the morning when April wakes up? Take a listen!

SYSTEMS / PROGRAMMING / GUI 

The back end of the system and user-interface has been getting a lot of optimization this year. However, the better part of the year was spent on putting together our limited social media system. It would be quite difficult for us to tell a story about a photography influencer without a social media platform after all. 

We still have a lot that needs to be ironed out with the system, but as you can see from the alpha gameplay below, it's coming together well!

We've also been putting together other systematic extras - including the Tracks/Music Gallery extra so that players can have a place to listen to their favourite tracks once they've been unlocked in-game.

ART / VISUAL ELEMENTS 

New Character Sprites

We've been rounding out the cast sprites this year, revamping certain characters, as well as making a few alternative configuration for other ones. Below, you can see our newest cast sprite additions which will round out our small but eclectic cast of characters.

Backer Cameos

The backer cameos are slowly on their way to being completed as well. Below are just a few of them. Please appreciate these adorable pets that will be making their way into the Diffraction world!

New Background Art

We've been rounding out the cast sprites this year, revamping certain characters, as well as making a few alternative configurations for other ones. Below, you can see our cast sprite additions which will round out our small but eclectic cast of characters.

Background Animations

In the background (pun intended) we've also been working on various weather animations for the story. For us, the weather plays a big part in the theming and narrative progression, so it was only fitting for it to have special background animations. We've been strapping down to hand draw these frame-by-frame as well.

Gameplay Snippet

Finally, the last item we would like to share is a very small video of the new content in action! Many new assets, more writing/narrative, music and a brand new mini-cg are built into this snippet, but we are keeping it short so we don't give too much away.

The four of us have put our hearts into every single component of this project; whether it's designing our own merchandise and packaging, or crafting almost every piece of a scene from scratch. Most of the time we can do this thanks to everyone's support, care, and concern - even though we often look a little like:

But the effects of this have started to take a toll on our health, and we want to prevent further escalation of that. We understand that rest and health are important in order to create something we are proud of and to maintain our standards. As such, we will be a bit quiet in January while working at a slower pace, but we'll be back in February!

Thank you for sticking with the four of us, and from this little group of friends - more formally known as Rain Droplet Atelier - we wish everyone a Happy Holidays and a great New Year!