Greetings from the land of Strobia! Kejayco here with another devlog post after just over a month.

This was meant to come out last week, but due to mid-semester tests, I had to postpone writing it for my studies. Not too much has happened over April, but here's what's been going on:

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Storyboards Update

We’ve started picking up on our storyboarding since our last post, and it’s really helping us to understand the flow of the game and make relevant creative decisions and solutions as issues arise.

Placing it as our #1 priority, we’re approaching storyboards on a path-by-path basis so that we can have a clear idea of each ending, one at a time without too much confusion. That means once we finish all the required storyboards for one path, then we move onto the next.

The storyboards pretty much can have 2 forms - either done in a .fla (Adobe Flash/Animate file) for more complex or nuanced scenes, or a static image to capture the essential shots and poses, as per this template:

Again, the goal is primarily to get the idea of the scene across to all the team members visually, so this is not a rigid formula - we do the storyboards for each scene based on what works best for it. As of right now there’s 1 storyboard in particular that actually starts off in a .fla and then continues in the template.

There’s still quite a few more scenes to do for this path, but using this approach for storyboards has definitely improved our productivity. For the longest time, especially back in 2020, we struggled with keeping a clear and consistent story flow with all the elements in the game. There were scenes that often felt out of place, forced, or weak relative to other scenes. I think I can be confident enough to say that since then, we’ve majorly improved in our methods and productivity in these areas.

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DA BIG SONG

As mentioned in our End of 2021 Update Video, Attacking the Tower's soundtrack is comprised of original songs made specifically for this fangame, as well as music picked from the Newgrounds Audio Portal, just like how it is in the actual Henry Stickmin games.

One original song in particular, has over 270 audio tracks AND COUNTING! It's been in production since 2020 and still has a lot left to do before it can be deemed complete and ready for mastering. Unfortunately that is all I can share with you for the time being, but it's something that we're super excited about and that I always get excited about when I work on it.  It's a BIG ONE for sure.

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Kej's New-Old PC

Another huge piece of good news that I’m really excited about is that I got my PC working again! Since 2020, I’ve been using a nice gaming laptop to do everything from university coursework to gaming, Attacking the Tower development, music, and Ace Attorney Abridged (another fan-made series). In early October 2021, my laptop stopped working and we were only able to save the files from its hard drive. I then switched to a less-optimal office laptop as a temporary solution until February of this year, where I then switched to a desktop that's been around since 2015. It still used DDR3 RAM :O

After 2 days of setting everything up and getting my files onto it, the desktop just crashed and wasn’t able to power on for more than a second.

This was awful, especially since all of my locally saved files including AtT were stuck there (we have a Dropbox that is primarily for animation and the master .fla, but I locally save all other things such as music, sound effects, and voiceover). AtT could’ve ended right there and then, since without those crucial files, we wouldn’t be able to truly complete this project.

We were optimistic though, and fortunately about 3 weeks ago, I was able to get a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM to get everything working back in tip-top shape! 

So while we’re still a long way from really finishing everything, we’re at least a couple steps back on track in the “audio department”.

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If you're still after a potential release date, my sincere apologies. After storyboarding is done, we do have a good plan for things to do next, and we'll keep you all updated, but there is still no way we can give a good enough timeframe. Like with my PC situation, anything can happen, and we've learnt from our mistake of the announcing Late 2021 to not give any more release dates until the game is close enough to completion for a good estimate.
All that’s left is to chip away at it and get it done!!!

Again, if you have any other questions please do join our Discord server! We’ve got a FAQ section set up, and we’re more than happy to answer any other questions you may have!

Thanks as always,
Kejayco