Hello! Time for our monthly update.

Art

As you may remember from our past devlog, all members of our art team (Anita, Lucy and Chiara) recently relocated to different cities. Now everyone is back at work, but this change created a challenge: Anita and Chiara now live 100kms apart.
Anita is our character artist. Chiara does backgrounds. But she’s also the Sacred Guardian of the Scanner We Bought With the Kickstarter Money, and she has to scan Anita’s drawings as well.
We decided against using snail mail, because watercolor paper is delicate and our past experiences as Etsy sellers taught us the mail should not be trusted. Cue a long, long journey to finally meet at some shady train station to exchange suitcases while feeling like drug dealers.

The suitcase and its contents now safely rest in Chiara’s hands.

At least Lucy works digitally, so can just plop all her sprites in a shared folder. She’s currently finishing all the sprites for the Green and the Yellow City, finally giving a body to some familiar faces you’ve seen in the demo:

Joe, our UI artist, recently got a full-time job and he had to relocate as well. We are starting to think all our art positions are cursed, like the Defense Against Dark Arts teachers of Hogwarts. On the other hand hey, if you have been postponing your relocation attempts for years, consider joining our team.
Only a few menus remain and Joe remains determined in finishing them, albeit slowly. He’s currently tackling all the main menu pages, like the quest journal and the items screen:

Writing

We started brainstorming about the Blue Quarry, the last of the five main locations that will be available in the game (the Red Temple, unlocked in a sketch goal, will later appear as a DLC).
The many populations of Selling Sunlight have their own, wholly fictional customs, but share visual similarities with real-world cultures. When Selling Sunlight was born, we mixed and matched different skin colors, costumes and languages from our world to create interesting combinations. Our goal was to create fictional cultures that feel new, interesting and fantastic, but without alienating the players.
The player character is not an alien visitor, but a person who has always lived in this world. To make the players feel the same way, we tried to fill the world with a sense of familiarity.

Spreadsheet of doom.

Even though our cultures are fictional, it’s important for us to avoid trite tropes that reinforce negative stereotypes. In our first drafts, the Quarry was described as “Ancient Rome + Moria”. The people of the Quarry are dark skinned, grumpy isolationists who live in a mountain and reject magic in favor of science.
We took a step back and realized we were basically making Drows 2.0.
Drows are kinda racists. Let’s not do that.

You have already met a character from Indigo Quarry: Miguel.

We’re taking steps to make this location less trite without having to radically rewrite all our lore. One simple change we decided to make is to not place the city inside a mountain, but above it. The hollow crater of an inactive volcano is a much cooler location, and better fits the technological background of our fictional city. GEOTHERMAL ENERGY, HELL YEAH.

The Indigo Quarry will pose great challenges, both from a writing and a visual standpoint. But we are determined in getting it right, and we know we can count on your feedback <3
Until next time!
The team