The First of Many

Hi there, welcome to Small Leaf Studio’s first newsletter! We figured we would start documenting our progress throughout each month of the game’s development from here till we no longer can make frequent updates. We plan to use these as a chance to share with you what we are up to and what we are currently working on. Also this is a chance to share some more aspects of our game in a more detailed breakdown. Anywho, on to the good stuff!

The Vertical Slice

• We’ve been working hard on building a vertical slice build of Mythren. This will allow us to approach publishers and attempt to acquire funding and also provides us with the framework of a prototype build for a Kickstarter if we do end up going that route for funding.

• A vertical slice is like a slice of cake. It has everything that makes the game, well the game. This isn’t the full product or at a full polish. Just a taste of what the game will be. If you’re still curious about what a vertical slice is I highly recommend checking out this Blog post on this very topic!

• We currently have one Mythren functional for the vertical slice, functional in both combat and in the overworld as well as the following features:-

  • Another functional non-playable combatant.
  • A functional Home island
  • Wild isles zone
  • Combat systems (Both player and AI/wild encounters)

• We feel that our current combat will be a great feature for our vertical slice of Mythren and have been making minor tweaks here and there while also focusing on giving some much-needed love to the home and exploration islands.

The Home Island

The Home Island is where you start every day of your journey and from here you can partake in many activities such as training, bonding, and spending a little r&r with your mythren. When you train or participate in activities you will use up activity points and after half of these points have been used up you will progress to night.

• Aidan has been working on the second training mini-game for increasing your speed stat, the previously shown mini-game was for the attack stat. These are how your mythren raise their stats after earning Training Points from leveling up.

• This month we plan on linking up the Home Island and Wild Isles so you can travel between the two and have a simi playable internal developer build that doesn’t require the unity editor to play and test.

The Wild Isles

The Wild Isles act as a place where you can level up your mythren, collect resources, and most importantly meet new mythren! When you want to visit the Wild Isles you must spend every single activity point you have at the start of the day to travel here. Carefully choosing between spending the day training at the Home Island or adventuring in Wild Isles is key to succeeding in mythren tournaments and raising your mythren.

• Carter has implemented the first of half of obtaining a mythren! This is known as the Mythren emblem quest. While exploring each zone of the wild isles you will encounter pieces of a mythren emblem that reveals the next location of another piece, once all the pieces of an emblem have been collected you will then be able to meet the respective mythren and have them join your team. Here’s what one of these pieces look like!

• Zane has been working on laying out Zone 1 and all the encounters and also the general feel of the island. He’s also been working on adding in a non mythren combat encounter. We will be revealing these mysterious creatures later this month!

• Our Composer Mejonat has been working on Zone 1’s theme and we are excited to share this soon! He has also been working on adding some juicy SFX for combat to give each hit that extra oompf.

• Jon, Javon, and Zane have been working on concepting ideas for items you can find to use and craft into new items. As an example some items affect mythren stats temporarily at a cost of health.

• Jon has also made a bunch of handy quality of life updates to our spawner system for the island thus making Zane’s life a little bit easier when laying out levels.

• Also finally we’ve been working on integrating some new assets into the project to help improve the look and feel of our environments. We will be making further updates to the appearance of the game as we work on the vertical slice and beyond!

Miscellaneous

• Jon has made the reward screen for the end of a battles! This lets you know what items you have been rewarded with, see how much exp you have gained, and if you have levelled up your mythren or not.

• The conversations in our dialogue system have been pretty unorganized, we spent some time categorizing them all for ease of access!

• Drake has been working away on concept art that we can show publishers to help sell the concept of Mythren.

Community

• We held a poll to see what your guy’s favorite starter was, and while it was a pretty close vote Keroair won. In response to that, we showed off some early concept art of Keroair yesterday!

• Also we want to announce a Q and A that will be held in our Discord this weekend! It will run all day Saturday starting at 9:00 AM CST and then ends at 12am CST

• A fellow monster tamer developer has released their game Costume Kingdom today! Go check it out and play their awesome game!

Thanks for reading our first newsletter! See you next time, on November 2nd!