Project Updates & April Streams (Patreon)

Welcome to April everybody - you finally made it! 

This month served as a productive one towards finalizing Tough Bippy, but as productive as it was - we still need a bit more time towards visual polish and overhauls. After extensive play testing we've been in the process of redoing a few of Bippy's attacks, extending their functionality so that every move in his toolkit serves some sort of purpose. As we've been working on that - we've also been readying ourselves for a big month here in April!

April often is when our budget gets a bit tight coming off of tax season - so it's why we'd like to use this month to ensure a stable budget for ourselves. Tuesdays and Thursdays you can tune in to Julian's stream to watch him do work on Tough Bippy art assets, but we'll also be streaming games on Wednesdays and Fridays - as well as a brand new streaming format we will be kicking off this month.

Wan Wan TV was a service we had planned a awhile back for broadcasting various gaming related content formatted similarly to a television channel.  It was designed to run alongside Tough Bippy development streams to give people something to watch if we weren't very talkative. While we did a few test streams with the service,  response was lukewarm so we put Wan Wan TV on the backburner.

The ultimate goal for streaming was to allow us to put anything made towards the game's budget, meaning we could do work on stream and be able to financially support ourselves. While we still do game development streams weekly - Wan Wan TV was an idea we wanted to return to once we had some original content ready. 

( Our first original Wan Wan TV series - coming to Twitch this April... )

This month marks the launch of one our very first Wan Wan TV original shows, with all funds raised during these streams going towards the budget for Tough Bippy. We'll be making a post heading into the premiere of this new show sometime in the next week. 

( Viewers are treated to a playlist of gaming media during the pre-stream! )

We hope that streams give folks here something fun to watch while we work on our games, and if things work out well, it may even speed up development thanks to the leniency it'll lend towards budget. If you're a fan of old media, games, and animation - these new streams will hopefully hit the spot just right. 

( The stream layout - tapes get stacked dynamically based on stream interactions! )

Once again - we'll make an announcement over here just before we premiere our new show. If people are interested in watching Tough Bippy development this month they can tune into Julian's streams on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We'll occasionally be streaming games on Wednesdays and Fridays. When May begins there will be a shift of focus back towards our games primarily, but we hope this month can end up being fun for people while we do some additional work towards growing project budget!

Tough Bippy had quite a bit of progress made towards it this month, although we still have been working on finishing/tweaking animations for the game. This month we got some animations roughed for various movement, and have currently been working on second passes on a few of the attack animations for the sake of balancing.

( Bippy's old Down+Punch compared to a work-in-progress of his new Down+Punch )

While we already detailed some of our work in the mini-update from a few weeks ago, here's a WIP of a brand new ducked attack we are giving to Bippy. In Build 1 of Tough Bippy - Down+Punch would perform Bippy's sweep. Now in Build 2 when you press Down+Punch, Bippy will start with a crouched punch which will combo into his sweep. This new attack has extended reach, more strength, can be cancelled into from Bippy's auto combo, but has long recovery if whiffed.

This new attack will hopefully provide a lot more usage than Bippy's sweep, and combo routes have been opened up significantly thanks to its inclusion. Pros will want to utilize this attack for combo extension and better damage output, it also sort of have a satisfying rhythm to cancel into it. 

( You can tune into Tough Bippy development streams every Tuesday & Thursday! )

Usually with our budget we're able to get about 3-4 animations finalized within the month, so with April being focused towards broadening that budget we'll hopefully be able to boost the rate of work in the following months. 

The good news is that Bippy has almost had the entirety of his animations cleaned up at this point, and with plans we have towards enemy and boss design, no characters should require as much animation and clean up as Bippy. We're still in the process of redoing a few of Bippy's hit animations to go alongside changes to the game's combo system, as well as finalizing a look for our controller configuration screen. 

Stay tuned for more details regarding our streaming this month, we hope you guys end up enjoying our very first Wan Wan TV show. While our schedule is going to be shifted around a bit priority-wise this month - never fear! Remember that in May we will be returning back to mostly game focus, it's only for April that we want to build up some additional savings that we can put towards our projects. You can follow the development of Tough Bippy on Tuesdays and Thursdays as Julian works on some final animations for Build 2, so be sure to tune in if you're curious about where things are at!

Thank you all again for your continued support - and we hope to make the most of April!

~ DD