Angel Wings Dev Update IV: Story Preview and Closed Beta Testing (Oct 2020)
Hi all,
Since the day Angel Wings began development, we’ve focused on writing a compelling and engaging story to match the art and technical design we’ve shared in previous Dev Updates. After all, why play a game if there’s no adventure to be had?
In today’s Dev Update, we’ll be giving a sneak peek into some of what you can expect out of the Angel Wings gameplay experience.
Weaving a Story
In case you’re reading this Dev Update without having seen our Steam page, we’ll give you a moment to understand the story of Angel Wings thus far:
Upon answering a mysterious phone call, you awaken in an unfamiliar place filled with new faces… Through intricate relationships and thoughtful introspection, will you be able to unravel the reason you are here?
The premise is simple: You’ve woken up in New Elvis City, a sprawling metropolitan utopia with beautiful scenery, beautiful people, and warm weather year round.
The question is, how did you get here?
With dozens of memorable characters and hundreds of hand-drawn art pieces, we’ve done our best to bring the world to life. Perhaps you’ll stay a while, and explore what New Elvis has to offer?
Choose Your Destiny
When we sat down and started planning the plot for Angel Wings, our goal was simple: Create a unique experience that suits the player, and provides a rewarding gameplay experience for those who are true to themselves. To accomplish this, upon starting a new game, you will be presented with a choice of three cards.
This isn’t a decision to be taken lightly, as the card you choose will immediately impact the new life you’ll lead in New Elvis City. For example, a Hierophant character may find comfort in sociable chatter, while a Hermit character may stray towards quieter locales.
A One-of-a-Kind Adventure
No matter which card you choose, you’ll experience the full depth of the Angel Wings story, with further choices to customize your gameplay experience. Thanks to a complex story system, no two players will experience the game the same way.
So sit back, relax, and play the game however you want - with enough luck and patience, you’ll be rewarded with one of our 20+ unique endings.
One Last Thing...
As you read this Dev Update, we've officially begun our final stretch of beta testing (yes, for real). Our qualified team of dedicated testers is helping us track down any remaining bugs or quirks in our code before our final release.
Generally my reaction upon finding bugs in the game
We hope you’ll enjoy the ride with us when Angel Wings releases this winter!
Angel Wings Dev Update III: Technical Details (Oct 2020)
Hi all, virusek20 from the dev team here. In this dev update we'll cover the technical side of Angel Wings and various challenges we had to overcome during development. Just like the previous Dev Update, this one will also answer the question "Why is this taking so long?"
Picking the right tools for the job
If you've ever tried making a visual novel, you’ve probably heard about RenPy or similar tools, right? We decided to use none of those, in favor of our own custom engine written in C++ using SFML. This was done in order to achieve an experience that reflected the original concept instead of trying to work around existing tech. RenPy basic setup takes only a couple of minutes, while designing everything from scratch is a several month-long project. As development continued, some more complex problems were encountered. We found that SFML may have not been the best tool for the job. We contemplated switching to yet another library later during the development, but it was already too late at that point and we didn’t want to risk delaying the project yet again. After all, one could keep switching tech like this forever, never getting anything done, so we instead decided to stick with what we had.
Cutting edge tech for a cutting edge VN
SFML is fine for its intended purpose, but the more tech-savvy readers may be puzzled as to why we decided to use a library like this if we claim we want to use cutting edge tech. We've slowly replaced pieces of this library bit by bit with modern technology used in high quality games while still retaining the fast development speeds that SFML offers. Honorable mentions are BC7 texture compression, DDS texture format, ZSTD compression for assets and the usage of modern OpenGL rendering techniques alongside the existing SFML pipeline. We didn't implement all these features just for the sake of it, but as a result of various technical challenges we've come across during development. Did you know that every single CG and background are at least 4K, some of them even more? Some scenes in the game use dozens of these in short timespans, meaning we had to get around problems like slow HDD speeds and massive memory usage that comes with 4K textures. As it turns out, modern AAA titles have already solved all these issues, so we tried to implement the very same tech into our engine.
History of the Angel Wings codebase
Before I joined, around 2017, there existed a prototype Angel Wings engine written in C# using Monogame that eventually got scrapped in favor of the current C++ based engine. This decision set the development back a few months, but I believe that this decision was worth it in the end. The major reason for such a big change was the fact that one of our lead developers was much more experienced with C++ and didn't want to slow the development down by using a language he wasn't proficient in. I personally never worked on this prototype as I joined after the switch, but as a .NET developer I must admit I would have preferred to refine the old version instead.
It's about the journey, not the destination
While this project has slowly grown into a full-sized game it's always been more of a fun side project for me, so I never opposed choices that involved "reinventing the wheel" in favor of using existing tech. Could we make something similar in an existing engine? Sure, but we wouldn't learn as much as we did during the last few years while working on this game. Given the fact that neither of us on the dev team are game developers by trade (or at least were at the start of this project), we’ve also gone through several rewrites of certain parts of the game because we realized that we went in a direction that lead to a dead end, so those also accounted for the longer dev time.
Final thoughts
So now you see why the programming part of Angel Wings took as long, if not longer, as the art side covered by the last dev update. Despite maybe sounding a bit bitter about the whole journey, I can safely say I’ve had a lot of fun and that it’s been an invaluable experience for me, both for my professional life as well as making new friends along the way. As always, please don't hesitate to reach out with questions or comments. We're always happy to provide updates on the game whenever we can.
-virusek20
Angel Wings Dev Update II: Art Design (Sep 2020)
Hi all,
As Angel Wings marches on towards completion, we figured it would be a good time to let you in on some of the art process and thoughts behind our design decisions.
In essence, this Dev Update will answer the question "Why is this taking so long?"
Art Design
With only one artist working on the entirety of Angel Wings, it's often a daunting task when considering the vast amount of content that needs to be created for a game of this magnitude. With a final script that's longer than most fantasy novels, there is a need for diverse and varied environments for the player to encounter - we certainly don't want the game feeling stale halfway through!
Environmental Detail
Initially, we envisioned Angel Wings as a light and simple school simulation game, similar to classic titles such as Clannad or Kanon. This simple design philosophy was reflected in some of the first environments for the game, illustrated all the way back in 2017.
However, as the development progressed and we gained a stronger understanding of our vision for the story, we realized that the backgrounds and environments are just as important as any of the other visual assets. As a result, some of the art has evolved over the years to meet our new standards of quality.
In the current build of Angel Wings, the game boasts over 140 backgrounds for the player to experience. This includes day/night variants as well as other exciting visuals.
Character Design
In the initial 2017 conception of Angel Wings, the characters maintained a very minimal, anime-styled approach. This initial design choice was made in order to facilitate a quicker turnaround time for the complete art assets. As the story evolved, so did our character designs. Each character has gone through multiple iterations in order to create a high quality model that captures some of their best personality traits.
For example, while Hyedong's pose has remained more or less the same throughout the years, her outfit and posture have been updated to reflect her bouncy and outgoing personality.
Special Scenes
For key moments in the story, we wanted to leave a stronger impression on players by making specialized art for those specific moments. These assets take the longest to create, but if you ask us, they're worth the effort!
Final Thoughts
The art journey for Angel Wings has certainly not been an easy one - more than anything, it's been a learning process filled with blood, sweat, and tears (not literally, you won't find any blood or sweat in the graphics for the game). We hope that those who have shown support for our team can continue to do so as we tackle the final stretch of development!
As always, please don't hesitate to reach out with questions or comments. We're always happy to provide updates on the game whenever we can.
-RumR
Angel Wings Dev Update I : Announcements and Logo Changes (Sep 2020)
Hi all,
With some fans inquiring about the current status of Angel Wings and the future of the project, we believed it was best to address some of the questions and concerns from the community.
First of all, we're truly touched and absolutely thankful for all of your kind and positive encouragement over the years - we've had fans on all sorts of social media platforms express their support for Angel Wings since its inception in late 2017.
With both our artists and programmers going through a host of major life changes as well as some unforeseeable challenges, the development has certainly taken longer than we'd like. That said, we're happy to report that the project is still chugging along!
A quick (recent-ish) update for us to share now: The new logo and graphical assets on the Store page! This brings a lightweight, modern aesthetic to a logo that was starting to feel dated.
The old logo:
New:
In the next few days, we'll be sharing some more of the exciting new updates we've made since our latest demo release, and we hope that this will be the beginning of a more regular cadence of dev updates leading to the eventual full release.
Thank you for all of your support! -Rum
Angel Wings Demo Now Live!
The Angel Wings demo allows players to experience a handful of the many major story lines included in the full release. While this is only a small snippet of the entire story, we are excited to showcase our progress thus far! Any and all feedback is welcome by leaving a review on the Store page or Discussion forums.
