Happy November Toasty fam! I hope all of you had a very lovely and safe Thanksgiving, and are ready to move into the December holidays. October was a bit of a slower month for development as we were addressing a lot of tricky structural things and there was not much to report, however, Faulty did prevail and we have moved onto play testing the first boss fight, Roxide! More details on this to come in just a few with other fun points we have also been up to. Strap in because we got some fun stuff for yah!

Here we go with the big deets. I will break up the update into 4 main categories this time: Art/Assets, Programming, Narrative/Concept, and Community.

A lot of October’s work was based around art and asset work which also continued into November full swing. Brian and Ivy have been very busy whipping up both concept work, and finalized assets for Avarice City to be input into the game. Though there is still much work to be done, we made some great head way here including some of the following:

• Started working on Avarice City outdoor & building exterior assets
  
• Turning concept art of city NPCs into finalized sprites
  
• Interior room work on some major scenes (Such as the theatre)
  
• HUD UI assets for the Roxide boss fight

As mentioned at the beginning Faulty has had his hands full building the internal framework for the Roxide boss battle and getting multiple ingame mechanics to work fluidly so that way it will be easier for us to implement these mechanics into other areas of the game. So here are some programming details for the Roxide prototype:

• Controls
  • [WASD] - Movement
    
  • [Space/Shift] - Roll
    
  • [H] - Shield
    
  • [J] - Sword
    
  • [K] - Knapsack
    
  • [L] - Hammer (even though you won't have that at this point in the game but just for funsies)
• Control testing for both PC and Controller use
  
• Mapping out the Intro & Death sequences
  
• Knapsack adjustments - you can no longer collide with it which means you can no longer push or pull it, but you can lift up still. However, this may change in the future to allow for these mechanics to be used during this fight, nothing is final here.
  Getting hurt or doing any other action will cause you to either drop or throw the knapsack
  
• Working out the combat sequences for the two stages of the boss battle
  
• Implemented HUD UI changes

So there have been two major pushes here when it comes to this category. As briefly mentioned, Ivy has been in full swing drafting up all of the concept artwork for the Avarice City NPCs and other artwork for our Kickstarter campaign. In terms of the narrative side, Justin has been banging out getting the dialogue and portrait images made for more of our beautiful Shroomville characters!

• Worked on Avarice City NPCs, their art palette and emotions
  
• Dialog box work and speech placement
  
• Implementing portraits to the dialog boxes and bringing life to the characters in game

We have had some things on the community front pick up a bit over the last few weeks! With our new Community Manager addition to the team, we have been working out how we can improve the community experience in a multitude of ways. Some of them you may have already noticed, but there is much work still to be done.

• Reviewed and Edited the current Discord Structure
  
• Added new moderation bots to Discord
  
• Added fun Toasty stickers to the Discord server
  
• Reviewing the editing the Steam storefront (This is in works but not yet completed)
  
• Getting the Steam community forums up and running and getting the community hub up to date

In a nutshell, this is pretty much the gist of it without going into too much detail! Our team is really pumped and motivated to work on and improve Toasty: Ashes of Dusk in so many ways. Especially since the announcement of our Kickstarter campaign which is to take place in Spring 2022! We are almost at 500 followers on our Kickstarter page, and we cannot thank you enough, especially those who have shared this page with your friends and family!

If you have not already followed and would like to join the list to be first to know when we launch, you can click below to follow!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pocketllama/toasty-ashes-of-dusk

Until Next Month!

Your Toasty:AoD Marketing Manager,

Tanya - AKA Tannyerz

Oh hai, hello! It’s Tanya here with a long overdue dev log for our marshmallow loving friends. I first wanted to start off by giving my sincerest apologies, I know many of you were reaching out asking about the Aug dev log and unfortunately, with personal life stuff butting in, both the newsletter and dev log did not go out. BUT, we are here now and I got the juicy info y’all have been waiting for!

Our kickstarter campaign’s follower count is growing like the shrooms in Shroomville and we CANNOT thank you enough for your support! It honestly means the world to us that so many of you want to participate in the development of Toasty: AoD. If you have not already followed and would like to join the list to be first to know when we launch, you can click below to follow!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pocketllama/toasty-ashes-of-dusk

Here we go with the big deets. I will break up the update into 3 main categories this time: Art/Assets, Programming, and Narrative/Concept.

Art / Assets
The months of July and August have been absolutely INSANE on our art front. There have been so many things tackled and completed that you would be shocked if you saw it happen first hand like myself! Brain has been like an art dev god and just ripping through their deliverables like they were nothing! It's cray cray y’all! Brian has also been streaming his artwork of Toasty:AoD on their Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/its_voxid - yes I plugged you Brian xD) Here is a little snapshot into their work for July & August:

• ALL animations for the first dungeon boss have been completed
  
• Completed all of the sprites for the collectible items available in the shops
  
• Started map tiles for the ghost ship dungeon

Programming
With Maya joining the ranks in the month of June, a lot of stuff has been getting done from our two programmers! Faulty has been nose to the grindstone working through backend code for the event system and ironing out all of that complicated alien code that I just don’t understand haha. Our lovely Doops (Justin East) has also jumped aboard the programming train just flying through some of the Shroomville stuff and more. He has even been streaming his work of Toasty through his Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/its_dooper - yes I plugged you too Justin xD)! So let’s get to the deets below:

• Maya added the “important item pickup” state for Marshall
  
• Doops condensed/revised Shroomville for better map feel
  
• Doops created the rooms for the first dungeon in the game
  
• Doops worked on the collision for the dungeons
  
• Doops worked on a surprise change to the great tree? (No idea what this is myself)
  
• Faulty revamped the transition system for travelling between rooms/levels
  
• Faulty added a pause menu with functional inventory and world map
  
• Faulty added some SFX & music
  
• Faulty updated the dialogue system and fixed a few dialogue bugs
  
• Faulty worked on backend code for the Event system that communicates between other internal systems

Narrative / Concept
The script is pretty much finished and ready for review and revisions! With everything written out, it is just a matter of mapping out dialog and where they are supposed to go. Ivy has also finished ALL of the concept art for the game’s maps. Like...all of them haha.

• Finalized the concept art for each of the towns and added in all details
  
• Dialog box work and speech placement

This pretty much sums up the main things the team has been busy working on throughout the months of July and August! We have been continuing our work into the month of September and I am excited to share them in the next dev log to be released in October! Keep your eyes peeled for more Toasty things! And last but definitely not least, thank you to all of you for your continued support and love. <3

Until Next Month!

Your Toasty:AoD Community Manager,

Tanya - AKA Tannyerz