Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Indie
Midautumn
New Character Reveals! Only two months until Early Access!
New Character Reveals!
We've been showing off some new characters on our tumblr, and we've already revealed two! make sure to check out our tumblr to see the remaining reveals as well all the fun stuff Alexia has been posting there!
Meet Vivian!
Vivian comes from a dystopian, cyberpunk future where the evil corporation AQUILLA has the world by its throat. Along with her fellow agents of the resistance, she spends her nights battling against the forces of greed, led by the enigmatic Jupiter. But how did she find her way into the Spirit World?
Meet Carlos!
Carlos is a struggling photographer trying to regain some semblance of a career after his big exhibition was a huge flop. He's still bitter about this, but keeping busy with his work at Sakurafest, an anime convention that's returning to Nambo Quay.
Our Backer Beta is coming soon!
I'm happy to announce that we'll be running our beta on March 20th, which is in a little over two weeks! The beta will probably run for a couple weeks and then we will take it offline to focus on implementing feedback for early access over the month of April. If you've backed us at the ($30) Weekend Trip tier or higher, or purchased a beta add-on, you should have gotten a separate email with more details on participating in the beta!
Early Access Build Progress!
Since the start of this year, we've been working on bosses and also getting a beta build ready! Since then we've spent most of the past two months improving on the minimum viable version of our beta build. We've added the first pass for our biome 3 boss, which is going to be the finale of our initial early access content (if you watch the above gif, you might even spot our new character Vivian showing up to help you during the fight)
Over the next two weeks I'm focusing on getting more gameplay variety in for us to get feedback on! More enemies, abilities, rooms, etc!
We've also been adding art to our biome 3 hub! The main things we still want to get done between now and our beta is going to be adding more variety to the spirit world sections, making sure all three hubs are explorable and have some narrative events implemented, and making sure adding more ancestral gifts to allow for more varied builds! During and after the beta, we are going to have another month or so to address feedback and figure out if there are any additional features we want to have ready for the early access launch, and what we feel should wait until our first few content updates! We'll be sharing an update roadmap with everyone once we've got a sense of what we want to prioritize! My current hunch is that more replayability for folks who beat all three biomes will be something we need to add soon but we'll take a look at what the data is actually telling us!
The goal will be to have enough content for folks to have a good week of fun with what's there already, and get everyone excited enough to come back when we drop updates during early access! This means three distinct biomes, with enemies, bosses, and story events related to all three + enough systems to try out different builds for each run! You'll have three explorable hub areas, the first one should feel complete and the remaining two we will be bringing to completion with shops and interior areas while we are in early access
What happens after our Early Access Launch?
Once we have our early access launch (Which is on May 9th) we'll be looking to increase the scope and polish to make the game something you can have a month or more of fun with! We'll be adding more enemies, shops and room variety to existing biomes. We'll add systems and content that make the game more varied and replayable, more accessibility settings, and we're going to shoot for two big content pushes with two more biomes! In order for us to not go broke doing this, we really need to make sure our launch in May goes well first, so if folks want to help out with that here is one way you can do so!
Are you planning on reviewing Midautumn when it comes out?
One of the best things that people can do to help us have a successful launch is write us a review during that first week of early access with your honest impressions! Reaching a certain threshold of reviews is very crucial to having the game actually sell so I'm always happy to encourage reviews, whether they're positive or critical! I'll be posting some reminders as we get closer and closer to launch so keep an eye out for that!
That's going to be it for this update folks! We'll have another update for you after beta is completed with our post beta thoughts and plans!
Midautumn is coming to Steam Early Access on May 9th, 2023!
We're coming to Steam Early Access on May 9th 2023!
We just announced the date at during the Game Devs of Color Expo Direct, which you can check out at this link and support us and all the other brilliant, talented devs involved in the direct!
here is the announcement video itself:
Here's some high level info about the announcement:
We didn't end up with enough video submissions from our community to include in this announcement video, so what I'm planning to do is hold onto the ones we've received and do another round of submissions when we're announcing our version 1.0 launch!
Steam Early Access will be sometime in 2023, which should give us plenty of time to get the amount of content we're targeting for early access launch! This will include 3 full biomes of gameplay! Some of our stretch goals and community designs will probably be completed during early access so we can get more feedback on them!
We will have beta access for kickstarter backers who backed at the Weekend Trip tier or above before our early access date, once we have our first candidate build for early access. I'm aiming to have ready by the end of this year and I will lock down the timing of our beta once we've confirmed that is ready! We're planning to use this to identify bugs, and confirm that the early access build is meeting your excitement for the game!
Based on the success of the beta, we will hopefully spend our development time in 2023 working on additional content that will be added to the game as early access updates, so there's interesting things to check out and return to the game for until we eventually hit version 1.0! If during beta, we identify high priority changes we'd want to make to the initial early access build before that goes live, we may end up focusing more heavily on that instead! How often we'll be able to add updates during early access, whether that's weekly (unlikely!), monthly, or a longer stretch of time, will depend on how much content we're able to make in 2023 to stay ahead of that cadence, and how much additional effort we decide to put towards improving the initial early access build!
Game Devs of Color Expo is this weekend!
If folks aren't already aware of Game Devs of Color Expo, it's one of my personal favorite conferences of the year and is completely remote and accessible no matter where you are! Midautumn is participating this year and I'll be giving two talks this year! One of them is about procedural storytelling and how we build our tools in Midautumn to be able to do a reactive narrative, and the other one is more about the reality of how we pay our bills as indie devs! Both of these are pre-recorded so I'll be able to answer questions in chat during the entire talk if anyone wants to say hi!
I super recommend checking the conference out, you can get tickets at this link at any point throughout the weekend, they have a number of affordable pricing options, including a form you can fill out here at any point during the conference for a free needs-based ticket
That's it for this update! Hope to see people there, and I hope y'all enjoyed the announcement video!
Be a part of our Early Access Launch Date Announcement!
Hi folks!
I wanted to let y'all know we're currently preparing to announce our Early Access Launch Date (the actual date is not going to be anytime soon so don't get too excited!!) and I'd love to get our community involved without spoiling the announcement for y'all.
If you'd like to be part of our announcement video please send a recording of yourself saying the following to hello@midautumngame.com: <*> all the months of the year in order from January to December 2 <*> a countdown starting from 10 and ending at one!
I've included a video with examples towards the end if folks need any clarification!
We'll be accepting submissions until 11:59pm PST on August 17th! It's not a lot of time so if we don't get enough submissions we'll do a more straightforward announcement but I'd love to involve the community if we're able to do so!
Let me know if anyone has questions!
Happy Lunar New Year!
Happy Lunar New Year Everyone!
We've been hard at work this past month cleaning up the Midautumn build, which hopefully counts towards our luck in the New Year! To celebrate, here's a brand new character reveal!
This is Harpreet! She's been trekking across the country hunting monsters for most of her adult life, and now she's turned up in Nambo Quay. What or who could she be hunting? The Trishula she carries appears differently depending on who's looking at it, so it's much easier to carry around in the waking world.
Game Improvements
A big improvement we're making in the coming months is fleshing out the many many UI windows in the game, giving them a lot more personality and bringing them more in line with the style of the game! Here's some early experiments from that process!
Plans for the Coming Months
The next big milestone for us is having a full skeleton of the game's beta/early access content that's playable! The plan is to make a very ugly looking playthrough video of the game for the team to comment on and help identify major improvements early before we start committing to a lot of visual polish! I'm not sure how much of this is going to be fun to share but if folks are interested in seeing that sorts of stuff let me know, we'll be getting in more art and content for the game's first two biomes coming in to share with y'all regardless!
That's it for this update! Have a wonderful Lunar New Year everyone
Midautumn at the Future of Play Direct
We're in the Future of Play Direct this Thursday!
I'm super excited to say we'll be participating in the Future of Play Direct, hosted by GLITCH! It'll be premiering on Youtube & The Game Awards pre-show on Twitch, Thurs Dec 9th at 3pm PT / 6pm ET! The lovely folks at GLITCH is also holding a viewing party in their Discord for folks who are interested! More details here We’ll be showing off an extended version of our animated trailer as part of the showcase so keep an eye out!
New Characters?
Since our last update, we revealed one of our new Spirit characters, Xiaoying--aka Wenye and Tsechoi's mom! We also have another character reveal lined up for y'all! What do folks think, should we make the reveal this Thursday or should we wait for a better moment in 2022? I'm open to suggestions! I hope everyone is able to have a lovely break over the winter holidays, we'll all be making sure to take some time off as well so we can be nice and rested for a nice and lively 2022 making our game!
Midautumn at the MIX Next Showcase!
Hi everyone!
We're participating in the MIX Next showcase and we've got a new character reveal for y'all! You can check out the showcase on Twitch! Meet Xiaoying! She's got some chill mom vibes and is in fact a literal mother to our spirit siblings, Wenye and Tsechoi.
We've been sending out Kickstarter surveys and I know folks have been asking for ways to back if they missed the campaign so we've officially opened up a pre-order store where you can get some of our reward tiers suchs as beta access, our art book, and even some of our physical rewards! You can tune into the MIX Next showcase to check out more of what we've been up to! Enjoy the showcase folks!
