Articles - Beacon of Neyda

Welcome back to another development diary, I'm Christian and I'm here to tell you the news about the development of Beacon of Neyda.



Future Demo
Every day that passes brings us closer to the planned launch of our demo along with other news (coff cough Kickstarter).
The Demo announcement it is completely official and will be available in a maximum of a couple of months.

What will this demo cover?
The introductory level of the campaign, where all the basic mechanics will be taught and a little of the internal Lore of this universe will be explored, leaving enough crumbs of history so that there is interest in seeing the following chapters.

We want it to be a playable experience of about 30 to 45 minutes but that depends on how much time each player takes to explore and want to search for all the secrets.



Development Status
As we mentioned in the previous Dev diary, we continue working on the enemy Spawn system, not only refining the formulas to use but also moving on to the more practical part of animation for the enemies.

The interfaces and internal menus are being updated, again if you saw our social networks we have shown new sections such as a codex, a space for the information that the player finds to be saved and can review it more calmly later.

New scaffolding systems were created for each of the buildings and their upgrades, as well as rework of the main tower of the tower stations (Main base). Currently, restoring the main tower will not only be the main goal to achieve but will also provide a practical improvement to the player for each level restored.

Finally, the specific upgrade system for each building offering one more layer of strategy is already created, these annexes will offer temporary or specific improvements. The simplest example to explain this concept is that of the defensive wall, it can be improved with an extra barricade that will accept the integration of the different cores, giving two effects, first it will give some extra life points to the defensive wall and secondly by combining it with a core, when destroyed, it will generate an explosion that will affect the enemies with the effects of the core it had inside.



Future plans?
What does the future hold? At the moment we just want to finish our games in development, and in our short-term future we want to be more active on social media again.

We do not rule out the idea of possibly adding vlogs on YouTube and other platforms to spread more about our experience and the development of the game, although this aspect is less oriented towards our audience of players and more towards other developers or people interested in that type of thing.

We also plan to participate in digital events, although for reasons of budget and focus on finishing our game we believe that this year we will not participate as actively in in-person events. It is true that they can be very interesting but they generally have a high cost in terms of finances and in terms of time.



And that's all for this dev diary. Remember to join our patreon or buy our minigames if you want to help us with the development.

JOIN THE COMMUNITYFollow us in our Discord community for more news and development progress.

First devblog of 2024, sorry for the delays like every beginning of the year and how our last few months have been... we could say that it has been busy, new things to tell about the development and news from the studio. I almost forgot to introduce myself, I'm Christian and I'm going to tell you about all the news!

Technology from Neyda world

"Upon arriving on the new planet all the AI's automation protocols came into progress and the construction of the big city began:"

With a better defined story and a deeper lore, many artistic and design decisions have been adjusted, mainly in terms of the functioning of certain things, for example the energy cores, their use throughout each map or level is going to be a lot more important since there will be a greater variety of machines that use it without neglecting its importance for the construction or improvement of new buildings.

Defining the technological level of a science fiction story can be difficult, our greatest inspiration comes from sources such as alien, cowboy bebop, Trigun among others.
We hope that the final result will be interesting for players looking for a more complex lore in their games, but for casual players, don't worry, it still has the same game bases of base construction, defending waves of enemies and exploration.

(early concept)

Development Status

Progress in development is constant but having to rearrange many of the previous systems to make them more modular has taken us longer than expected. We are currently working on the new enemy spawn system, this new system will allow us greater control, choosing which points on the map can make enemies appear, with what frequency, what type and quantity, taking into account different global variables that will adjust the difficulty of the waves according to the player's skill.

This also enables other game modes apart from the campaign, for example survival, how long the player can survive with infinite waves and limited resources? You'll have to find out when the game is released.

Finally we confirm that most of the changes that we mentioned in the last couple of devblogs will be able to be tested in the future demo to be released, we are still defining how much it will cover and what the experience will be, but our goal is to have a free demo so that everyone can try it and give us feedback on the game.

(Yeah prototype of one of the enemies in 3D printing)

The Ghost Creative team

Many players see the development of a video game as something linear, which is why I have been very careful not to mention possible release dates, since being an indie studio our life is not so linear or stable (if you have read the previous devblogs or follow us from the beginning you will know it). That's why I wanted to share a little about the team.

We are currently 6 people working on the game, mostly from Argentina, although our studio also has roots in the neighboring country of Uruguay.

We hope to slowly build the team as we finish this game. Currently looking for pixel art animators to complement the work of our wonderful artist Franco.

We are also very happy because our musician and audio specialist Leandro has taken a few weeks off due to the birth of his second daughter.

We are a small team with great ambitions, remember if you want to help you can join our community or follow us on social networks.

Remember to join our patreon or buy our minigames at launch if you want to help us with the development and thanks in advance.

JOIN THE COMMUNITY
Follow us in our Discord community for news and development progress.

Okay it's been almost 2 months but Christian is here! Hi! Today I bring you a summary of how development is coming and what has happened in these almost couple of months since our last dev diary.



Why the delay?
Let's get to the point, because we are working on the game... yes I know you would think it is a stupid answer, but if you have seen the previous dev diaries, you will remember that we have had a lot of problems working on the game in the year... To be able to maintain the studio we accepted other jobs and made small progress on Beacon of Neyda, slowly but steadily, but we did not get the funds to finish it and after many rejections even our motivation waned a little.

Luckily several things changed and finally for almost 2 months we have been working full time on Beacon of Neyda. History, mechanics and designs in general have already been defined and we are working on creating the best possible game, we still have limitations, we have not ruled out the idea of a kickstarter and we have opened a patreon, we do not know if it will work or if there are interested parties but we would appreciate all the help possible.

Finally we have plans to continue working for the next 6 months without interruption to finish the game. Don't forget to join our Discord to find out the latest about our projects.



Development Status
In the previous dev diary we mentioned that we were going to change the construction system, but to achieve that we had to rewrite a lot of code, and it is something that we are almost finishing. After definitively modifying and fixing our drones, we have worked on the new construction/upgrade system and how the player interacts with everything.

In art, the work has been exhaustive, the amount of environmental assets for the new levels are on a very good track and the new elements with their animations are also on the right track.

As for audio, new music tracks are being worked on and we are playing with the idea that narrative elements of the game are not only through the visual of the environment, but also have the possibility of adding specific narrative audios.

which brings us to the point of the translations and languages that the game will have, at least in text we hope to start with the game translated into at least 5 languages at launch.

English - Spanish - Portuguese - Italian - French

As far as audio is concerned, English and Spanish, if possible... but the latter is not yet defined.



New award won
To close this new dev diary I would like to share with you that we won a award, we have been relatively quiet about the game without taking it or sending it to events since we are working on it. But we did a test by sending our game to ExpoVit, a small-scale video game event where we won an award for "Best Story and Narrative." That makes the entire Ghost Creative team very happy as it shows that we are on the right path with what we are working on for Beacon of Neyda.

That's all, maybe we'll have some more updates next month, but we'll probably take a couple of weeks during the holidays and the new year.

Remember to join our patreon or buy our minigames at launch if you want to help us with the development and thank you very much for your patience, we are finally moving forward in the way we wanted in the development of the game.

JOIN THE COMMUNITY Follow us in our Discord community for news and development progress.

It's me Mari... I say Christian and as I anticipated in the previous dev diary we have returned to work more energetically in the game and I come to tell you a little about this.

Neyda world

"When the Artificial Intelligences tasked with terraforming the desert world of Neyda rebelled against their creators, the world’s settlers were forced into war with the machines. With all communications destroyed, the people of Neyda fought alone to reclaim their world.

Decades later, the survivors of the war continue the fight against the last robots, still infected by the AI’s orders of destruction. Meanwhile, something new may be awakening in the sands of Neyda…"

With this basic premise we advance in the creation of the world and its places, what scenarios the player can visit and what secrets to discover... from the outer zone of the capital city, its industrial zone, its commercial districts in the interior to the mega beacon structure.

As you can see, the sketches are already underway and we have many plans of what we want to achieve with each new scenario.

Development Status

First of all, if you follow us in our Discord community, you have found out that our game is to be added to wishlist on new distribution platforms and if you had not found out, what are you waiting for to join our Discord community?

Secondly we have started to work on solving certain issues that we found in the gameplay, some things that simply did not work in the tests we carried out, for example the interface to build, something that many of the players found confusing in its initial use.

We add more details to reach an alpha with a playable demo but we still need to improve the flow of the game.

Possible kickstarter???

Despite working on the game again, our financing situation is still insecure and we are seriously considering the possibility of a kickstarter to solve the lack of resources and once again restore attention to our game. It is something that we will surely discuss during the next dev diary.

We also plan to start a small closed test of the demo during the next month, from Steam we have lists of keys to give out... so stay tuned for news in our Discord community

And that's all for this month.

JOIN THE COMMUNITY

Follow us in our Discord community for news and development progress.

Christian here! Hi! Today I bring you a summary of how development is coming and what has happened in these couple of months since our last dev diary which was a while ago... so let's get down to business.



What happened?
Getting to the point, lack of financing, that's what happened, since we couldn't secure any stable source, we had to carry out other types of work and actions to maintain the study. This left us with little time for the game. In addition, our studio has a particularity, despite being a small studio (5 people), we generally take care of actions that larger studios would do.

An example of this is participating in different events both in our country and in other countries, helping to generate a local community with different actions, such as talks or events. Which also absorbs a lot of our time and sometimes even part of our budget.

Does this mean that the game died?... No, quite the opposite, although it is true that we still do not have a fixed budget to be able to work on it full time, we have been making small advances in development, but again they are "boring" advances since they are difficult to show.



Development Status
Firstly, new trailer, I think it shows the idea of the game better, secondly we have a new logo. The old one was fine, but to generate promotional material and take it to events it did not look good. Thus the new logo was born, no longer in a pixel art style but I think it works just as well together with the main art image.

The third action that we were carrying out was the update of the engine where the game is created, this is a task that can take a while and always generates errors that developers have to deal with. So why did we do that if it brings so much trouble? The answer is simple, we need to keep the version of the engine we use updated so we can port to consoles without much difficulty.

A request that we had from several fans is that the game be on multiple platforms at the time of its release and it is something that we are fulfilling as well. Other things we did was update the general lighting system for interiors and some advances in the creation of art assets.



How is the development going from now?
Again I want to close this blog entry on an optimistic note, we hope to have very good news soon. That means finally having the time to work on the game as it deserves, but in the worst case scenario we're still going to move on and one way or another we will finish the game.

If you follow us on our social networks you will also see that when we are working on other jobs we always create a mini game and launch it. If you play our other games, share them and leave us your opinions it also helps us a lot to continue.

...And that's all for this month. Hopefully the next blog post won't take so long.

JOIN THE COMMUNITYFollow us in our Discord community for news and development progress.