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Crystal in Carnations

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Two women bound by fate rise as Vivestria falls. Gather your allies and shape their journey through dual battle systems, life-altering choices, and multiple endings. In this story-rich tactical RPG, every decision leaves a scar. Will you save a dying kingdom, or forge one worth saving?

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Crystal in Carnations Devlog #29

Mar 8

Note: If you would be interested in:

Getting info on future play testing opportunities
Chatting with the devs and like-minded people about your favorite games
Taking part in future raffles (You may get to influence easter eggs in the game)
Seeing these devlogs earlier

Consider joining our Salmon Snake Games Discord Server[discord.gg]! We would be so happy if you joined our small community ^^

Welcome to yet another devlog for our game ^^ This sprint has largely been about fisxing a lot of weird bugs, but there are also some pretty neat large-is features at the very end.

This devlog's topic -- Cake Clubs!

Last friday the devteam had our monthly cake club! For those not in the know this game team was originally a cake club. Well it still is. This time we convened at script writer Elmo's place. He baked us some excellent pineapple pie from his historical cookbook. I believe this recipe was from the 1700's?

The club works so that the baking turn rotates to the next club member every month. Since we are four people everyone get's to bake once every 4 months. This is not actually that much baking in a year, so despite the fact that the cake club is soon 6 years old, we are by no means professional pastry chefs :P

Cake clubs are great! I recommend every dev team starts a cake club, even if it's virtual. There was a time when one team member lived in Norway temporarily, so we had to make the cake club partially virtual. It worked quite well actually, so I do recommend this even if your team isn't local.

We do have this (unspoken) rule that during cake club we don't discuss our game project, or if we do, its lighthearted and jokes, but no work allowed! It's good to have some time with your team when you talk about things besides the project. For us it's quite easy since we are a pretty tight friend group and we do loads of stuff together even without the game project. This sometimes brings it's own problems. Conversations about money and project finances are always a bit iffy between friends, but we prevail.

Marketing:

💠 Our current wishlists stand at 123 (+11) I hope they keep con rolling in even if slowly ^^

Art:

💠 Vivi and Hani have been hard at work creating pixel art characters for our demo. Thet first made a crude version of each sheet to make sense of how many characters we need in total for the demo. Vivi made me promise to stress that these are still very much WIP

Story:

💠 Elmo has been finalizing our chapter 1! Years after starting this project, I will be able to start implementing the text into the game ^^ (That will also let me stress test our dialogue system implementation with real script)

Programming:

💠 I fixed a bug where characters would start drifting from their tiles if they repeatedly took damage

💠 I fixed a bug where the enemy turn would start twice at the same time if the player skipped their turn

💠 I fixed a bug where the attack animations would get stuck for infinity, if enemies had no space to get knocked back

💠 I fixed a bug where the Health UI could go to negative numbers

💠 I fixed a bug where knockback amounts were calculated incorrectly

💠 I fixed a bug where a dialogue loop would continue forever, because the player would exit dialogue and the same input would restart it

💠 I fixed a bug where character portraits would not show up if the player restarted dialogue immediately after finishing

💠 I optimized our character portrait assets by making sure all texture sizes are divisible by four

💠 If you knock an enemy into another enemy, the otherenemy now also takes knockback damage

💠 I added dynamic lighting into the game and made sure all the UI assets would ignore the lighting. I love dynamic lighting in pixel art games ^^ This is still quite mild stuff, but I think the lighting immediately makes the game pop a bit better. (Also please ignore the unfinished fire effect

💠 I added a blur shader that blurs everything behind characters during dialogue scenes. I will configure this so that the player can adjust the strength of it, since not everyone likes how it looks

That is everything for today! I hope you have a fantastic week ^^ Thank you for following our development journey

-Hanuli from Salmon Snake Games

Crystal in Carnations

Crystal in Carnations Devlog #28

Feb 20

Note: If you would be interested in:

Getting info on future play testing opportunities
Chatting with the devs and like-minded people about your favorite games
Taking part in future raffles (You may get to influence easter eggs in the game)
Seeing these devlogs earlier

Consider joining our Salmon Snake Games Discord Server[discord.gg]! We would be so happy if you joined our small community ^^

Hello again! It is time for another devlog. This forthnight has unfortunately been shadowed by numerous IT issues.

My computer of 5 years is nearly at the end of it's life. When I got it in January of 2021, it was already refurbished by then. I think it's originally from 2017, so it's pretty much an elder machine. I've already ordered it's replacement but I do mourn for it somewhat :( (And my wallet) Despite this we've had a good sprint! Even if a lot of it is kinda unexciting progress:

Marketing:

💠 Our current wishlist count stands at 112 (+12) Wishlist our game here at Steam!

💠 We ordered some business gard for the game! I love that we get to use the key arts in them ^^ If you happen to find yourself at the monthly IGDA event in Helsinki, we'll gladly give you one!

Art:

💠 I drew the expressions for Eloise's remade sprite. I hope those are the last expressions I'll have to draw for a while!

💠 ...That said I did one more expression for every character in the game. But this one was easy! A simple black silhouette "expression for everyone)

💠 I started working on a concept for Bellegarde's background art. Bellegarde is the first city you encounter in the game. I'm pretty new to this whole landscape painting thing. Originally we had planned to have a professional artist to draw all the mandatory backgrounds for us, but that got expensive fast and I cannot evade developing this skill forever (nor do I want to.) I've improved as an artist a lot over the development of this game and I'm hoping that my art skills will at least partially translate to landscape paintings as well.

Programming:

💠 Fixed an issue where the main character's animations would bug out, if you clicked a new destination before the previous destination was reached

💠 Fixed an issue where the game let you talk to two npcs at the same time and got confused as a result

💠 Overhauled enemy attacking logic, since my first attempt wasn't up to snuff and caused issues like enemies using attacks from illegal range

💠 Implemented a bunch of different hit patterns AoE skills can have. In the gif you can see a line attack that I thought looked pretty rad!

💠 Implemented the player, enemy and other phase indicators

💠 Implemented knockback on skills. Units are sent flying by a skills knockback amount. If they are stopped by hitting an obstacle, they take the remaining knock back amount as damage instead

💠 Implemented a custom cursor that changes shape depending on what you are pointing at (talk icon for npcs etc)

💠 Completely overhauled our audio system to use FMOD in preparation for an external audio engineer that will be joining the project

Thanks for reading again ^^ May your week be filled with your favorite things. See you again in roughly two weeks!

-Hanuli from Salmon Snake Games

Crystal in Carnations

Crystal in Carnations Devlog #27

Feb 4

Note: If you would be interested in:

Getting info on future play testing opportunities
Chatting with the devs and like-minded people about your favorite games
Taking part in future raffles (You may get to influence easter eggs in the game)
Seeing these devlogs earlier

Consider joining our Salmon Snake Games Discord Server[discord.gg]! We would be so happy if you joined our small community ^^

Hello again! ^^ It was my birthday since the last devlog. I received absolutely beautiful watercolor art of Eloise and Willow as a gift from a friend I'm so happy about them I put them on my wall. I hope I can see lot's of fanart of our characters one day. At least let me hope...

I like to write these devlogs immediately after we finish our bi-weekly sprint meetings, so I let the last sprint extend a little to sync them with the meetings again after we all returned from our christmas break. For this reason this devlog is quite meaty!

Marketing:

💠 We have reached 100 (+10) wishlists on Steam! Woohoo. It's quite pathetic amount, but considering we have not marketed that much yet, I take it as a win :P I expect most of our wishlists will come when we release the demo, but my heart stings a little every time I see a post on reddit celebrating the thousands of wishlists a game has gotten on the first week. But I try not to pay them any mind.

You can help us if you wishlist our game though!

💠 I have started posting on TikTok. If that is your social media of choice, follow me at

https://tiktok.com/@hanulisalmonsnake

Art:

💠 I finished old fisherman Greg's expressions! Now all characters in our game have their expressions! (It only took a year...)

💠 I promised myself a long ago that once I have drawn all the expressions, I would let myself re-render Eloise. She's our other main character and her design had stayed mostly the same since 2022. I felt like She wasn't up to my standards anymore. Here is a before and after picture

💠 I made some pixel art indicators for turn changes (? I'm not sure what they are called. The gif speaks better than I)

💠 I created an indoor battle map for testing purposes. It will probably have no use in the final game, but I got sick of looking at the snow landscape on all my development gifs. Making this also made me realize some of my UI elements are not visible properly on darker tiles, so yay for testing?

Story:

💠 Story progress is happening again after a few devlogs! The script length is currently about 512k words (+28k) With only two endings for willow remaining

Programming:

💠 I implemented the stat display for tiles on the bottom of the screen. It looks a bit cluttered, but it is unlikely any tiles have that many stats to show at any given time, so it's probably fine

💠 I implemented a burning mechanic! Fire spells now set the environment in fire and the fire can spread to neighboring tiles! The fire tile graphics are NOT final :P Not all tiles in the game will be flammable, but that shouldn't discourage you from living your arsonist dreams!

💠 Created a button that let's you pass the rest of your turn

💠 Added some selection and cancelling sounds to make the UX a bit better

💠 Fixed character shadows disappearing under certain conditions

💠 Fixed some UI bugs

💠 Fixed an issue where fire spread faster towards south and east than north and west

💠 Fixed an issue where the game forced you to move your character if you decided to attack before moving

💠 Fixed an issue where it was possible to walk on other units

Phew that was a lot of stuff. I refuse to let these get much longer because that would eat too much into the development time, so I think I'll end it here. Please look forward to our next devlog and thank you for reading! <3

-Hanuli from Salmon Snake Games

Crystal in Carnations

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