Kickstarter Update #5

Game

Selling Sunlight - Wandering Merchant RPG

8 years ago

Quick update as we fill our luggage. We’re heading to London for a very busy week.

EVENTS

Is Rezzed too chaotic, costly and/or tiring for you? Come at Bonus Stage instead!
We’ll be exhibiting at Loading Bar, in Dalston (London) this Sunday with our friends from Tea-Powered Games and many other cool indies. Check up the complete games lineup here.
We’ll bring our old Kickstarter demo and a ton of bee stickers to distribute. We’ll also be wandering at Rezzed on Friday/Saturday, so do bother us on Twitter if you wish to have a chat.

GRAPHICS

Lucy has been making assorted idle animations for all our characters. They’re pretty nice.

We also finally finished putting all the rescanned art assets into the game. The new scanner truly makes a difference!

Bad Scanner (left) vs. Good Scanner (right)

We also scanned the new locations Chiara has been working on, populated the Green city with random NPCs and started working on the light effects.
Have some screens:

GAMEPLAY

Giada has been working on the items database. We now have a complete spreadsheet of all the items you can buy and sell in the game, complete with names, categories, prices, weights and descriptions.

Game development: at least 50% of it is made of spreadsheets.

STORY

Most merchants also have a name now.
Selling Sunlight is a game about how cultures shape people, so we put a lot of effort into giving everyone a meaningful name.
Instead of using real names, we studied names from different cultures and tried to isolate what makes a name “feel” French, Japanese or Italian: recurring sounds, combinations of letters, rhythm, length. We then tried to match each of our fictional populations with the feeling we wanted to evoke.
The inhabitants of the Golden Beehive, for example, are a noble and elegant population descending from ancient warlords. To accentuate the dissonance between their bloody past and their baroque, shining present, we gave them short and harsh-sounding names full of Hs and Vs. We also gave them patronymics: a vestige of their old organizational structure based on warrior clans.
Strange-sounding names might be difficult for players to remember. That’s why we also made sure to give every character a definite role (The Heiress, the Grocer, the Bard) and to always pair roles and names for easier memorization.