Progress Update #1

Hello! After about a year of on-and-off progress, I'm finally ready to start sharing Surface Level with people. I'll use these devlogs as a way of cataloging my progress, as well as communicating my plans for the future. Over the course of the past few weeks, I've made a ton of progress on Surface Level, and I plan on keeping it up!

As of right now, the game is roughly the length of the original Ludum Dare game (20-30 minutes), essentially being a very polished version of that prototype, and the rest of the story is planned to be a direct continuation of this. I've also implemented the first boss-adjacent combat and a very solid framework for future combats; the grayed-out moves do work, they just cannot be used in the first combat.

Importantly, the game's first open alpha release is missing some pretty important stuff:

• There is no main menu.
• There are no settings or save files. Foundational code exists for save data, but nothing can be saved or loaded yet.
• Piper and Avery's combats do not have music yet (they currently use Atlas' track).
• The Jack-in-the-Box combat currently uses the game's default combat theme. It'll have unique music in the full game.
• Avery's passive "NOT ME" doesn't work yet.

Additional art and sound effects will be retroactively added to the game as the story lengthens.

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out my passion project!

Until next time,
Cadence