Author: danieltjewett

We mentioned in our post last week that we would be sharing our updated Steam capsule art, logo and trailer.  Well, today we wanted to share what we have been working on behind the scenes.

First, our updated logo:

Next, our updated promo artwork:

And finally, an updated trailer showcasing mechanics and new areas we have been working on:

Yes, we plan to update the demo with some new areas, a new tutorial and integrate more of the actual story into the beginning sequence.

We’re still committed to bringing this game to life, and we’d love for you to stay connected with us as we continue our journey. Don’t forget to follow us on social media to stay in the loop and join our amazing community: https://linktr.ee/thevioletsofamicus

Your support means the world to us as we continue to make The Violets of Amicus a reality. Thank you for believing in us.

We were awarded “Best in Show” at Cleveland Gaming Classic yesterday! I (Dan) was in shock that our game won. It was quite the honor to have received this. I’m still shaking from it! Thank you to everyone who voted for our game… it means so much! I also want to thank our small, but amazing team who continue to help create Violet: Tony, Eugene, Anthony, Christina. I couldn’t do it without all of your great work! Most importantly, I want to thank my wife, Kennedy (who was working our booth at the time of the award, because I thought we were required to have someone at our booth at all times!). She’s been through all the ups and downs on this project, giving me encouragement when I need it. It’s a team effort, and I am thankful to lead a team of creatives who also believe in this game, pouring in their best each day.

Today marks the final day of our Kickstarter campaign, and while we did not reach our goal this time, this isn’t the end for The Violets of Amicus.

Friday, March 14th was my (Dan’s) last day at my current job, Lightspeed Voice. I had been there for about three and a half years. It’s bittersweet. I am thankful for the opportunity to continue growing as a software developer, but I am excited for the next phase in my career.  Today begins a new venture as I pursue mostly full-time development on this project. “But Dan,” you might ask, “How are you going to do this full-time?”

It’s been a roller coaster of a month. Obviously, not getting the funding from Kickstarter was discouraging. For those who have supported, I really do appreciate you more than words can express. Knowing that you’d be willing to support our team with your hard-earned money in continued development of Violet is quite the honor, and I will not take that for granted.

Once it became apparent that our Kickstarter was most likely not going to get funded, a revelation struck me: “Instead of 2 years development, what if I crunch the numbers with 1 year of development?” As it turned out, we had enough in our savings to continue full-time development on Violet for one year. Obviously there are roles and sacrifices to be made without the full funding, but it was possible.

The story doesn’t end there though.

When I gave my three weeks notice to my current employer, I floated the idea that I would be up for part-time work one day a week, along with a few other requirements. I didn’t think they would be up for these requirements. However, to my surprise, Lightspeed Voice was willing to keep me on for one day a week.

Obviously, this isn’t the ideal situation, as the plan was to work on the game “full-time” rather than “mostly full-time”. But, working on Violet for four business days out of the week is a really amazing opportunity when all is said and done! And I am really grateful to Lightspeed for keeping me on as a contractor moving forward.

Having another revenue stream really opens up possibilities. Mainly, it will pay the business expenses while not tapping into as much of our savings. This essentially means we can go two years of “mostly full-time” development! This is the next best thing to getting the funding from our Kickstarter! Obviously, for those who have backed, we can’t guarantee that the game will be completed in two years, as that was what the proper funding was for. But, I can say we’ll be even that much closer to completion!

This is an amazing opportunity and I am going to make the most of every day. I am also excited to continue leading our small and humble team in making this amazing game. We have a lot to accomplish in the next couple of years. Maybe we’ll decide to do another Kickstarter. With lessons learned and a naturally lower funding goal, we’d be sure to reach our next goal. Or, maybe we look for a publisher who can get us the proper funding we are needing. Maybe something else. Who knows? The main bottleneck was that a full-time job was preventing me from being able to “spread my wings” and see where this game can go. Now, I’m finally able to do so.

We’re still committed to bringing this game to life, and we’d love for you to stay connected with us as we continue our journey. Sign up for our newsletter to get updates on our progress, new plans, and future opportunities to support the game. Don’t forget to follow us on social media to stay in the loop and join our amazing community: https://linktr.ee/thevioletsofamicus

Your support has meant the world to us, and we’re more determined than ever to make The Violets of Amicus™ a reality. The second phase of The Violets of Amicus™ begins. Let’s go!

Today is the day! After six years of development, we are excited to announce that we have officially launched our Kickstarter Campaign for The Violets of Amicus™! We have 30 days to reach our funding goal of $80,000. A breakdown of the funding is as follows:

Once our goal is met, I (Dan) will be working on the game full time, while the rest of the team will ramp up in work. The goal is to have the game completed in 2027, releasing sometime in 4th quarter. Though we have quite a bit left to finish, we have a strong vision and dedication to this project that will see it through to the finish line. We would love for you to be part of our success story in the launch of our official game!

Our campaign is an “all or nothing” – meaning we need to raise all of the money in order to have had a successful Kickstarter. If you are graciously planning on funding, please consider backing today, as that will help with a smoother launch, and a better chance of being successfully funded. Those who support (based on the amount supported) will be rewarded with credits in the game, a copy of the game, the OST, and much more!

We can’t thank you enough for backing our project! It’s also just as important to share with as many people as possible. Word-of-mouth is going to be what carries this campaign to the finish line, and we can’t do it without your help! Please share on social media, text, email, pigeons, whatever your preferred means of communication!

Thank you so much for following along. The next phase of Violet has begun. We can’t thank you enough for your support!

At the beginning of January, we released our demo on Steam!  Overall, it was a successful launch and we are excited that so many people were able to checkout The Violets of Amicus for the first time!  Reception has gone over well, with all recommendations at the current time of this writing on Steam.  We appreciate each and everyone playing our demo.  If you haven’t got a chance yet to play the demo, or review the demo, please do so here.  It helps boost our game so that other people will see it!

During this past month, things have been a bit slower, comparatively to the craziness of December!  That doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy though as we have been hard at work marketing and preparing for our Kickstarter launch.  As mentioned in our previous post, we are a week out from launching our Kickstarter campaign!  If you haven’t clicked the “Notify me on launch” button, please do so!  Again, it helps boost our project so that other people will see it.

Now, onto the updates!

Art

Tony has been currently finishing a few animations that were low priority for the demo, that didn’t quite get in at launch.  These were some breaking animations; a bear statue and sawmill junk:

We also began work on the big bad Centaur!  We showcased the stand frames last month.  Currently, we have been working on the walk and canter animations:

We are hoping to get these into the demo before the launch of our Kickstarter.

Speedrun and Commentary

A couple of weeks ago, I (Dan) decided to try doing a speedrun of our demo.  I test the game a lot and decided to give myself a challenge (as well as try to uncover any bugs).  The current world record is 25:08.  This is a pretty steep challenge, but I am already aware of about 3 minutes that could be shaved off from optimization.

We didn’t want that video / challenge to go to waste, so about a week ago, Tony and I decided to do some commentary about the development on Violet while the speedrun was playing in the background.  You can watch that video here: https://youtu.be/-pZi7ifh7T4

Streamers and Youtube Video Highlights

We had a streamer, Bashfulday, scheduled to play our demo the day after release day.  It was a lot of fun watching her play the demo.  We can watch this stream here (Content Warning: there is some language in this): https://youtu.be/3sQ-rEMenOo

Meanwhile, we also found three Youtubers who played our demo — one which we presume is from Italy!  It’s been exciting to see people play through our game.  We can watch these videos below (Content Warning: there is some language in these):

Matt Plays Indies https://youtu.be/QEPwa71Pgm8

GogetaSuperx https://youtu.be/H4mDTa5dbCk

Sid Ruxell Gaming https://youtu.be/FcMrrkmo4pE

Updates from Gameplay Observations

Now that the demo is out there in the wild, and we have gameplay footage out there for all to see (including us), we are able to watch these playthroughs and make any adjustments / tweaks.  For example, we found a common issue of people not realizing that the West Gate is the way out of Jasper (Castle Town).  This can be observed in Matt Plays Indies’ video above.  Therefore, we made a few adjustments, to help the pacing and get people playing “the action parts” of the game:

• Make the Fortune Teller Open 24/7 – Luckily, people who were getting stuck did find the fortune teller, and she explained where to go next.  However, her shop wasn’t always open.  Therefore, we kept it always open.
• Make the West Gate more Obvious by Adding a Sign and NPC – We noticed in a few playthroughs that people tend to through the South Gate of Jasper.  Therefore, we put a sign out there explaining that the path is blocked off and only the West Gate is available.  We also put an NPC outside of the North and East Gate, explaining the same thing.
• Make Picking Up Weapon Scraps not go to Assets Inventory – This actually came directly from a review on our Steam page!  Essentially, when picking up a weapon scrap, while picking up dropped weapons, pressing start would take the player to the assets inventory page.  Most cases, the player actually wants to go to the inventory of the weapons they are picking up.  A easy one-line code change to make player-experience all the better!
• Auto Save Loads at the Hospital – Because saving / loading was a last minute feature, we weren’t able to thoroughly implement how it will be in the real game.  This lead to people getting put in positions upon loading that would cause them to softlock.  Therefore, loading will always take you to the hospital.

There were several other clean up and fixes around this, but these were the highlights!

Music Updates

Eugene has been cranking out tunes left and right!  Below are two snippets, the first is the Enemy Variation of the Forest Town (which is already in the demo now) and the second is the Forest Temple Theme, which we plan to add to the demo before the launch of the Kickstarter:

Other Notable Updates

Game Maker Updates

We have been on the February 2024 build of Game Maker.  As mentioned in previous posts, Game Maker kept introducing bugs that were preventing us from upgrading.  With the launch of our demo approaching, we decided to stay on that version.

With the “downtime”, we decided to finally upgrade to Game Maker 2024.11, the latest version at the time of this writing.  The 2024.8 version was actually already tested, except one bug that wasn’t fixed.  Therefore, this was a quick turnaround to fix.  However, in updating to 2024.11, we found a couple of issues:

• Game Maker decided that methods should use self (this equivalent for other programming languages) explicitly instead of implicitly.  I’m still unsure why, but it’s resolved now.
• There actually was a bug introduced in 2024.8 with collisions that we didn’t noticed until we had already started upgrading to 2024.11.  This had to do with our rampTileCellData system, and how the game knows which layerDepth an instance should be in.  It was essentially and order-of-operations issue, that we resolved by adding a simple conditional.
• We also fixed two of our own bugs while refactoring / cleaning up:
  • When quitting to the title screen, there was an issue with the way we went about cleaning up our instances under certain circumstances with enemies.  We thought it was something to do with the collision_rectangle_list function (as seen here), but it turns out it was because one of our gates was not working as intended.
  • We’ve had a major issue where instances would activate in the background and therefore either be in places where they weren’t supposed to, or disappear when they weren’t supposed to.  We ended up overhauling major parts of this system, and even optimized unloading to be 3 times faster.  We believe we have squashed this bug, but time will tell!

Ubuntu Builds

We attempted to add native Linux support, as well as native Steam Deck support.  However, our findings were that Linux builds were about 33% slower than what the game ought to be running at.  In regards to the Steam Deck, we found that the Proton experience was much more performant than native Linux builds.  Right now Game Maker’s Linux tools are still in beta and just aren’t quite ready for production.  Because Linux is the default for the Steam Deck, and these performance issues hinder player experience, we decided to remove Linux support at this time.  More information can be found here.

AStar Extension Updates

As you may recall, we rolled out our own pathfinding extension, as we wanted to perform these calculations on a different thread.  We’ve been encountering some silent crashes, where the game would crash without an error report.  These are the worst kind of bugs, because it doesn’t give us any insight on what happened.  Well, we figured out a way to gather that intel, and we determined that, at least one of the silent crashes, was caused from a race condition in unallocating an AStar instance while another thread was using it.  This has been patched and fixed.

While we were looking into Ubuntu builds, we also were able to create an AStar extension that would be compatible with Linux builds.

Conclusion

Please share our Kickstarter page with anybody who would be interested!  We appreciate you reading and keeping up-to-date with the development.  Be sure to follow the socials and stay tuned for the launch of our Kickstarter campaign!

In exactly two weeks (2/15), we’ll be launching our Kickstarter for The Violets of Amicus. We need to raise $80,000 in order for our project to be successful. $40k will be designated towards art. $15k will be designated towards programming. $5k will be designated towards SFX design. $5K will be designated towards testing. $5k will be designated towards marketing. And $10K will go towards Kickstarter fees and taxes. Our goal is to have the game completed in 2027, releasing sometime in 4th quarter.  Our campaign is an “all or nothing” – meaning we need to raise all of the money in order to have had a successfully Kickstarter.

Typically, Kickstarters are most successful when they have an good start. A good start means getting 25% – 33% of the goal within the first couple of days. If a Kickstarter doesn’t have a good launch, Kickstarter’s algorithm will most likely suppress the page, making it even that much harder to get funded. If you are graciously planning on funding, please consider backing on 2/15, as that will help with a smoother launch, and a better chance of being successfully funded.

Thank you for considering backing our project! It means the world to have you help support our game.  For those who are following along, but don’t play games and want to support, Kickstarter does have a “Make a pledge without a reward” button.  For everyone else who plans on supporting and are wanting a reward, this is what we’re offering (each previous reward is included in next reward):

• Name in Credits – $5
• Game Copy – $25
• OST – $35

These rewards include the previous three, but are each their own reward:

• Name a Minor Character – $75
• Name a Major Character – $250
• Talk with the Team – $500
• Producer Credit (Custom Game Addition) – $1000

We are also offering limited amounts of early bird rewards of “Game Copy” only, at $15, $20 and $22!

Thank you so much for following along.  The next phase of Violet is soon to begin.  We can’t thank you enough for your support!

After six years of development, we are excited to announce that The Violets of Amicus demo is now available to play on Steam! You can play the game for free on Windows or Mac here! So grab any modern controller from your game console(s), connect to the computer, and Steam will do the rest!

The demo can last anywhere from 4-6 hours—there is a lot packed in! Our demo showcases a good vertical slice of the game mechanics / loop, story, music, art and even a dungeon! Please let us know what you think of it on social media or in the comments below. We are always looking to improve our game and would love to hear from you!

The game is intended to be played in one sitting. However, we are aware of some rare crashes. In the case of a crash, we do have an auto-save feature that will come in handy to load progress back. We only save major progress, like inventory, cleared forts, and story progression. We do not save defeated enemies, cut grass, trees, etc. We also don’t save dungeon progress. The full game will do a much more thorough job of saving, but we only implemented this feature recently.

With this major milestone, we wanted to take a trip down memory lane and showcase different art on the site over the years (cue Time of Your Life (IYKYK)):

As always, thank you so much for your continued support into our game.  We appreciate it more than you’ll ever know.

– Dan

We have one more week before our demo releases on Steam!  This past month has been crazy.  With final touches, polishes, new features and a trip to Cedarville, I (Dan) have been working overtime on my side hustle.  We’re excited to show off what we’ve been working on.  And soon enough, you’ll be able to play what we’ve been working so hard on the last six years!

One thing to mention before we get into the meat of our update.  We are in need of boosting our pre-launch numbers.  To help us with these numbers, please visit our Kickstarter page and click “Notify me on launch”.

Now, onto game updates!

Cedarville Trip

At the beginning of December, we were invited back to Cedarville’s 2024 Video Game Exhibition.

We got to meet / talk with about a hundred individuals interested / excited about the game.  We had about 15 people play the game.  The majority of these folks played a good 30 minutes or so, getting a good idea of what Violet will be about.

Overall, it was a good experience and we received a lot of good feedback that has already been implemented in the game.

We had one individual who was really into our demo!  As he was playing and we were chatting, we didn’t realize that the showcase was over!  We appreciate all of the support and feedback at the showcase!

Pixel Art

Tony has been working hard finishing all of the final touches / polishes on pixel art.  However, we do have a few new art assets to share.  First, if arrows are shot perpendicularly they will stick in enemies and Asteric.  Below are a few animations of Asteric removing the arrow from an enemy or himself:

We also spent a lot of time in December working on polishing the horse animations.  Below are a few of those:

And finally, a prototype of our Centaur Enemy!

We were hoping to get more done in December with the Centaur!  Unfortunately, we only got to still frames.  We were hoping still frames would work to fight against the Centaur in the demo, but it does not.  We’ll probably be taking the Centaur out of the demo.  But, we wanted to show what we’ve been working on in regards to the Centaur!

8 Weeks Remaining Updates

In the conclusion of our last post, we said:

“Believe it or not, this post doesn’t even cover the last two weeks!”

And, we weren’t kidding!  In those two weeks we had completed the following:

1. Demo Content (including many side quests)
2. Added NPC Generic Hair
3. Added Talk Circles (to indicate how many more unique dialogs an NPC has left)

This actually encompasses a lot!  We decided to showcase these with video clips!

Forest Town

We spent the last month or so polishing up Forest town.  This included adding new NPCs, side quests and main quest objectives.  We also started working on Forest Town’s theme as well.  We can hear this in these video clips below:

The Forest Town NPCs have their own clothing style that reflects the atmosphere — a cozy / laid back town nested in the forest.  However, a wizard lives in this town that can grant us the power to automatically merge:

Once we have received the power to automatically merge, we can remove the gate that blocks our path into the Ancient Temple:

There are quite a few other things to do in Forest Town!  Be sure to explore it thoroughly:

Saving and Loading

One major feature request we have been receiving is the ability to save and load the game.  We understand this request, as the demo is pretty lengthy.  However, because of the complexity of saving and loading, as well as our data structures and gameplay to change in the future, we originally did not want to invest time into this.  Plus, the intention of the demo is to be played through in one sitting, taking about 4 hours or so.

The problem though is that players have been occasionally getting crashes.  This is a pretty rare occurrence and unfortunately we haven’t been able to reproduce these (and trust us, we don’t take crashes / bugs lightly).  If we could, we’d fix these in a jiffy.  However, with the amount of time before the release of the demo, we realized it would be in the best interest of our players, in case of a crash, to have some kind of saving / loading system.  That way, progression isn’t completely lost if a crash happens.

Thus, we have spent the last few weeks working on a MVP saving / loading feature.  This feature is actually much more elaborate than we were originally planning (we were just going to restore a players inventory).  However, we were able to save story flags, completed forts (removing enemies from these forts), heart pieces, inventory and more!  Plus, we added an auto-save feature that automatically saves in the background.

You’ll see a couple of additional things in this video clip as well:

• We updated the Title Screen to include our concept art, as well as a Continue Game, New Game, Options and Quit Game.
• We added some text during the loading screen while the game loads.  We also updated the loading audio track, for those who have really slow machines, so that my (Dan’s) voice communicates to the player that the game is still loading and that there are no issues.
• We added a Main Menu screen, that has the Save button, as well as a Quit to Title Screen button.

All of these features were important and were necessary to make saving / loading work seamlessly for the player.

Correct Button Labels for Controllers

Our controller button labels were correct, for the face buttons.  However, our names were inconsistent across other controller types for the bumpers, triggers, sticks and pause buttons.  Therefore, we went through and cleaned this up to be dependent on the controller the player is using:

Encrypting External Data

With the release of the demo, the public would have access to the game.  This also means that any files / data in these folders are going to be scrutinized and we can’t just tell people “don’t do that”.  Therefore, we decided to spend a week encrypting external data, such as the text file and world assets.  That way, if people starting digging into these assets, all they will see is gibberish.

We also wanted to encrypt our audio files as well.  However, we couldn’t figure out a good way to do this, in the limited amount of time we have.  Unfortunately that meant moving these files into Game Maker / RAM, making memory usage for the player about 100mb more.  Once we figure out a good way to playback audio files from disk that are encrypted, we will move these audio files back outside of Game Maker.

Apple / Mac “Fun”

Apple does not make it easy for developers to make software.  In order for self-made software to work on another computer / device, Apple requires a process known as Code signing.  Unfortunately, we wasted a few days trying to get our builds to work on Macs.  However, we found this guide by Game Maker which helped us get our builds to work on other machines.  We adapted this guide into our own step-by-step process.  Hopefully this can help any other developers deal with Apple’s “Fun”:

1. Let’s make our build by clicking Create Executable (CTRL+F8) and then choosing Package as Zip.
2. This will begin compiling the game with Xcode. Once this is done, this will create a zip (Archive) and run the game, as well as having the “Xcode” project handy, but we need to do a few things.
3. In Xcode go to Signing & Capabilities and then select the +Capabilities section. From the window that opens, double click on the Hardened Runtime option.
4. Of course, we’ve already created an Archive (which can be deleted), but now we need to create ANOTHER archive, by going to Product > Archive.
5. In Window > Organizer > Archives, we should see our build / archive we just created (probably two, but like in step 4, we can delete the older one). Click on the Distribute App button.
6. Click the Direct Distribution (aka Developer ID) option and click Distribute.
7. We will then need to Upload. The gods at Apple will notarize. This seems to go really quick, though they do say “less than an hour”. There is supposed to be a notification, but we have not seen this.
8. We will see our Developer ID status in the organizer window at the bottom right. Once this is ready, it will say “Export Notarized App”. Wherever we put this is were our app will be. We can copy and bring to our Steam upload process.

Other Notable Updates

We’ve had three streamers play our game so far!  It’s been exciting to see people enjoy our game.  We can watch these clips / streams at these links below (Content Warning: there is some language in these streams):

• KirbGoneFishin (just clips)
  • Going in guns a blazin to a fort
  • Bats attack in formation
  • Never fight birds in any game
• Guinnanth
• Pause and Effect

These playthroughs were invaluable, as it introduced a few bugs we needed to fix as well a few game play issues.  Luckily, we were able to fix / update the majority of the issues seen in these streams!

In fact, one bug we have been encountering for about 4 years was caught on stream, and I (Dan) was finally able to fix this bug!  We can see it here.  At 1:24:47, we burn ourselves, and then our temperature gauge malfunctions.  We were finally able to figure out that it was because the very first frame a fire spawns was incorrectly setting its percentage (how potent the flame is) to 0, instead of what it should be.  Percentages of 0 are assumed to be fires that are being put out / removed.  Well, if we happened to take burn damage on the exact same frame as we spawn a flame (that has a percentage of 0), our temperature becomes NaN (because we divide by 0, and this is how Game Maker does division by 0) and would break our temperature gauge permanently!

Below are some other notable updates:

• We added a fortune teller, a character than essentially tells the player what to do next, if they are stumped.

  

• Dying in the dungeon sends the player back to the beginning of the Dungeon.  That way, the player isn’t trapped in a boss battle they can’t beat and can stock up on supplies and items.
• As you probably saw, we made our trailer!  During the months of October and November, we added some hotkeys to make getting these shots easier / better, as well as disabling certain UI / HUD elements.  This will be inaccessible during normal game play though, because we’ve disabled keyboard cheats in our builds now.
• We finally got around to adding text to signs.  That way, if we get lost in the world, we can at least follow a road back to a town, or some other notable landmark.
• We added the Ancient Garden.

  

• Kennedy renamed all of our current NPCs to their actual names.  I (Dan) was currently using names like Grandma NW, so I’d remember where these characters were located / what dialogue they have.  It has been quite different to see these characters with names!
• We fixed a major bug with our RampTile (an invisible trigger that increases / decreases what layerDepth we are on). There was an assumption that the point of a mask / hitbox will always be INSIDE of the rectangle.  Well, our character’s swimming mask is NOT inside and the assumption was off (and therefore not getting off ramps properly).

Conclusion

As you can imagine, this month has had an extreme amount of polishing and fixing.  So much so, that in our notes for writing this post, we ended up throwing away roughly 3 pages of features / bug fixes.  And this post is already quite lengthy!

Please wish list and share (especially our Kickstarter page) with anybody who would be interested!  We appreciate you reading and keeping up-to-date with the development.  Be sure to follow the socials and stay tuned for the release on January 3rd!

At last! It is time to finally reveal the official demo trailer for The Violets of Amicus:

But wait, there’s more! Our Steam Store Pages are now live! Please Wishlist our demo and the main game!  We plan to release the demo on January 3rd, 2025.

We Need YOUR Help

This project will only be successful if YOU help share it with others. We are going to be hitting the social media platforms hard in the next few weeks. Whenever you see our posts, please share! The more eyes on this, the better chances we have of being successful!

For those who have followed along and have helped contribute, whether with game assets, testing, or simply being supportive, THANK YOU! We couldn’t do this without your support!

Our Pre-Launch Kickstarter Page is now Live! Please share with those you think will be interested!  The call-to-action is to use the “Notify me on launch” button.  Having these preliminary numbers will ensure a smooth start of our Kickstarter in February.

That’s all!  Short and sweet today.  We have more development updates coming soon!