Sunday Devlog 1: House Maintenance
Yo!
Starting today, Iām going to begin doing weekly Sunday devlogs. This is going to last until the inevitable steam release of Parse-O-Rhythm, and probably longer. Iām finally able to do these weekly recaps again since Iām back to health (I was sick for part of last week) and have completed moving back home from college, and have enough free time to devote lots of it to game development.
So, whatās happened in the past two weeks?
The rebrand
I already announced it here, but we finally officially renamed ourselves from āSup3r87 Gamesā to āEncabulated Gamesā. This was because naming it all after just me was being disingenuous to the other people who help out on our projects, and because we are slowly putting more focus into selling games rather than making more free web games.
When Logan and I were coming up with studio name ideas, we made multiple categories, ranked them ourselves, and chose our final categories that way. One of the categories was naming the studio after a funny device of some sort, and since I had heard of the turbo encabulator prior, āEncabulated Gamesā was one of the finalist names, and in the end we chose to run with it against the other finalist options.
Screenshot of the Figjam board we spent most of the time ideating in
The logo went through a lot of ideating, revisions, and review through several friends. Fortunately, I landed on a design that everyone I talked to liked in just a day, so I didnāt throw away too much time. In the end, I am very happy with the design I ended up finishing.
Initially I wanted an E with a lightning bolt and a device behind it, but every attempt I made was too watered down, too cluttered, or both
The final design placed the original device on the corner of the E with a gear on the other corner. I quickly realized that this design still got the āfictional machineā point across and was more readable, so these are the results!
Rebranding in all of the game projects, however, proved to be just as herculean of an effort. I had to create a new startup animation and then make it work in all Encabulated Games projects, which took longer than expected. The main reason is that every one of our game projects has credits built in slightly differently, so lots of variants were made for different projects.
Parse-O-Rhythm
Galacdrive
The Novavis
*And moreā¦
The rebrand also means renaming ourselves on all the platforms we distribute games on. There is a chance (and a very strong one in Appleās case) that Encabulated Games might need to be legally registered as a corporation to change names, but thankfully for other platforms like Google and Steam, itās only some keystrokes and a button click away from changing.
Google still needs to verify the name change, but allows us to change everything else. Interestingā¦
All in all, we still have to:
- Potentially register as a corporation to rebrand on Apple
- Complete the rebranding on Google
- Update our trailers to include the logo
Before the rebrand is complete. We are thinking about making an official website, but thatās currently something that is not too high on the priority list (since we arenāt really seeking to be hired by anyone or make a LinkedIn yet).
Parse-O-Rhythm
Next week, (in addition to posting this log in the afternoon rather than the evening) we will share an official Parse-O-Rhythm roadmap so everyone in and outside of Encabulated Games has a clear view of the development plans to launch a paid version to Steam.
Speaking of inside Encabulated Games, @ThatBoxLion and @nhgcr_for_the_3rd_time have been working since March to produce two new track albums that will be present on the Steam version of the game. Lionās tracks are candy themed and are going to be extra difficult, and Prism (Nhgcr on the forums)'s tracks aim for a more chill vibe and will be easier, calmer tracks.
I think the kitchen might explode with how much these guys are cookingā¦
It has been massively fun watching them cook up some genuinely awesome tracks, and it also makes me happy that more people in the Flowlab community are contributing music to the project. Many artists outside Flowlab are going to be contacted requesting music licenses for more albums, and there will be a thread posted on the discord server inviting people to request artists for me to contact.
Aside that, some very minor UI tweaks have been made to the game, but nothing significant enough to report on. However, over this week, a LOT more work will be done on the game now that everything else has been (mostly) cleaned up and taken care of.
Thank you very much for reading this dev log, and we look forward to reporting on more in another week!
-Everyone at Encabulated Games