Barnaby Start! Alpha is a go!

Hi everyone! Time for another update, I usually try to sneak one in before the month ends!

We are now officially in Alpha! Goodbye Pre-alpha! With 3 chapters completed out of the intended 6 chapters woohoo! That includes Prologue, The Goat Escape and Chances with Wolves. We are now progressing through Grim Grinning Goats. I plan to have playable builds for the new chapters soon once final vocals are prepared. I provided all scratch audio for the previous chapters and as hilarious as it is, it ruins the story telling a tad haha. Our first recording session starts 9th March and I'm super excited to get all our VAs in a call. We wanted to make sure they were all together to record so they can bounce off one anothers performances. 

Before we get started we have a new plushie on the way from Makeship, the fearsome cat pirate Elaine!

Super excited to see her come to life! For those who bought Barnaby and are waiting on his comic, we intend to have it finished soon. Ash is knee deep in preparing storyboards and cutscenes in their most busiest period on the plan. Cutscenes are now being animated in 3D so they'll need to keep up with the core game first, but rest assured we haven't forgotten him! 

Next up lets see a little sneak peak of young Fantoccio! Because I absolutely adore him! We decided that Fantoccio can actually grow, the wood he is made of is alive! 

Take a sneak peak at some voice acting! Played by a family member from the developer team, we think he did an excellent job! 

Sadly we can't show you the full storyboard as it is stuffed full of spoilers! This cutscene won't actually be in the game, but will be used to help sell a segment of backstory to the team so they understand the emotional beats better when portraying other aspects of Fantoccio's story. 

New mechanics! Inspired by the game Infamous you can now teleport around, it's stupidly fun. We imagine this ability we be introduced in Barnaby's chapter as a level specific mechanic, but may become available in previous chapters as part of the epilogue

Billie is also seeing a potential upgrade to her current move set with a backflip addition! Unsure if this will make the cut but we wanted to experiment further 

Billies ice magic has also seen an upgrade making it super duper fun!

Aristotle has some faces! This time made by Guia as Ash has been swamped with storyboard work! 

Lets look at some dialogue concepts by Ash!

Lets look at Dutch's penthouse!

Starting off by setting the tone with some lovely music for the area by Adam 

Some wonderful work from Jovi and Pepe designing and fleshing out Dutchs living area

Some awesome work by Michael bringing the concepts to live in 3D!

Speaking of Dutch we also have his underwater hotel concept, Dutch loves catering to all the animal types! So you can see this large underwater dome hovering around in the background 

We also have some rough concepts coming together for one of the rides at Dutch's theme park area, telling the story of a cute bunny and dastardly fox! 

Next up, lets look at Barnaby! The chapter we are currently working on! Ash, James and myself (Katie!) are cooking up some fun levels for this chapter. Some more Adam music to set the scene 

This will be the first music to play as you enter Barnaby's domain. This plays before the party starts, there will be a separate track for when things really kick off! Something a bit more Barnaby-esque. I feel this soundtrack really fits the old "Barnaby", before he died. 

Some sneak peaks at Barnaby's boss fight animation! 

Woah, is this spoilers? Probably not

Some rough concepts for Barnaby's song animations (the chase sequence) 

Billie has a custom run animation for this sequence too that goes to the bpm of the song!

Before we finish up we also have a new character announcement! Meet Dimitri the chimera! 

Watch his voice acting reveal and full storyboard here

And a somewhat finished cutscene featuring Barnaby! Props, sound effects and soundtrack are still missing, but it makes for a wonderful test of the cutscenes to come! This particular scene was by YerkDiff on twitter

That's it for this update, but we will see you soon!

Katie <3