Midli Progress: Narrative, Art, Atmosphere and Bug Fixing
Hey all!
Firstly Happy belated New Year!
We wanted to bring you all an update regarding Midli and how we’re getting on. Over the last year we have been making some progress on Midli, and while we’ve not been able to work on it full time at any point (as we have mentioned before; Midli work is out of pocket for us and we do need to pay rent, hehe), we have still managed to get a few good bits done.
Here are just some of the areas which have been worked on:
Narrative: We have been discussing internally a fair bit in regards to how we originally wrote out the story for Midli. Keeping in mind that the original story was written when Midli was first conceptualized 5 years ago, a lot has changed, not only societally, but also to us personally as people. We all went through a pandemic and some pretty dark times, and this really made us want to rethink the tone of Midli and how dark we wanted to go with it. We will delve deeper into this in a separate update, but this is something that has taken up a lot of time and thought as we finish up writing the story and developing the tone.
Atmospheric sound design: We have been collecting and putting together a nice library of calming atmospheric sounds for each level. We have even taken to recording some of our own whenever the exact sound we want is hard to find. Listening to this alongside the music has been a really great way to see Midli come even more to life. We have also nearly completed a neat sound manager system, giving you some options to customize your audio experience when you play Midli, such as managing how sound effects will play and transition alongside the music.
Asset creation: We have had to take a big look at how we have been handling our asset creation for levels. We were very ambitious at the start of the project and this has led to both a lot of work and an extensive list of assets that need creating and optimizing, as well as the game having a much larger file size than we want. Not everyone has ample space on their phones so we want to try to make Midli as accessible as possible to download and play. We have been editing and organizing our assets to streamline them a little more, and see where certain assets can be reused. We of course are doing this without compromising on our vision for Midli’s aesthetic, but this change is making it a lot more feasible for us to finish the work quicker while optimizing the game size and performance.
Bug fixes: We have had a couple of bugs that really halted game production for a while. We were considering getting in a third party to look into helping to iron some of them out, but luckily Christian was struck with a classic case of 1am coder brain and found a solution! One of the main game breaking bugs was a physics issue where Heli would often start slowing down halfway through a level, and this has finally been fixed!
These are just some of the main areas we have been focusing on throughout the last year, though we have also been doing several smaller tasks throughout the year, such as tweaking UI elements, polishing music looping, redoing some environment animations and much more. The point is; Midli is progressing and for the first time in a while we are really feeling good about the pace at which we are able to get things done, considering we thought we would be a lot further behind than we are now. As soon as we have some spare time we want to try to make some updates to give you all a closer look at some of the things we have gotten done above, so keep an eye out for those. Bear in mind, making a more extensive update requires a lot of time editing screenshots or video clips and writing everything out, so we often end up wanting to use that spare time to actually get the game done!
We hope you all are happy to hear that Midli is progressing, we really wish it could happen even faster, and we are working on some ways to potentially make that happen, but we will update you on that as our plans become a bit more solid.
We hope 2023 will be an amazing year for all of you and that you are all staying happy and healthy!
Louise & Christian
