Baby, It's -270.45°C Outside

That's the average temperature of deep space, by the way. You know, because sci-fi and stuff. Anyway, hey every and/or anybody. It's hard to believe that the holidays are almost upon is again already, but here we are. Time just never seems to slow down.

It has been one hell of a year for pretty much everybody, and we are definitely no exception. I'd like to save the bemoaning for another time though, because we hope to have something very special (read: new demo!) to show off at the start of the new year. Will this come true, or will the horrible, horrible legacy of 2016 rear its head one final time? Stay tuned to find out.

Look Familiar?

Hello and welcome to anyone taking the time to read this. It's Lunch here again, and this time I'm happy to show some of the progress that our team has made over the last few months.

I've mentioned before that our next planned demo will be consist of both new and old-but-improved content, particularly on the writing side of things. While we're still currently working on finishing sprite and CG assets required for it, the needed backgrounds have been done for a little while now, so we've had a chance to give the game's user interface a complete revamp.

New menu, old placeholder title screen image.

To be honest, it's taken us a long time (and many, many reworks) to settle on an overall design and theme for our GUI. Part of the reason for that is because we had to decide just what a retro-futuristic adventure on a nuclear-steam-powered spaceship in an alternate, space-oriented Victorian era would look like, and that's easier said than done! It's not like you can just pop all that junk into Google and go from there. It's a journey in itself, and it's one that probably won't be over until it's over, but we've recently settled on some design choices that we're happy with. See for yourself and let us know what you think!

If you noticed the "Almanac" button in the screenshot on the top right, the Spacer's Almanac serves as the game's codex, and will allow players to continue exploring the lore of Familiarity's universe as they unlock new entries during gameplay. Hooray for world-building, down with info-dumping!

Speaking of building worlds, now is also a good time to mention that the preliminary (as in not first but not quite last) draft of the first act of the game is now complete, clocking in at about 145,000 words when accounting for all alternate scenes and branching paths. That's a whole lot, and it may shrink or swell a little after further editing and revision. Eventually we'd like to release the whole of act one as a large, standalone demo, but there's a lot more work to do before we reach that point. Particularly in the art department, so if you or an artist you know might be interested in joining our team, we'd love to hear from you!

Come to outer space, we have fireflies waifus! Art by Chocojax!

Well, that's about all we have for this update. There are a few other things we could show you (such as a rather incredible song by Doctor Jekyll, who suffered through no less than seven drafts to make it so, my fault entirely), but we do have to keep some tricks up our sleeves. Until next time everyone, and as always, we welcome any thoughts, questions, concerns or feedback you might have. Thanks for checking in.

Deep Space B(r)ass

SEVEN
WHOLE
MONTHS
Without a blog post. Dang. Is there anybody still out there?
Well we're all still here, and we've been making slow but sure progress where we can, when we can. We have some cool stuff to show and tell you about, so here's something that will hopefully tide you over until we have it polished and spitshined.

Above is a time-lapse of our design process for creating backgrounds in Familiarity. Our stalwart and talented artist LordFryingPan starts with a description and tone provided by our writers, creates an initial sketch, and then we work together until we eventually reach the final product seen here. Check back (potentially much) later for more!