It's been a very busy year. After a lot of hard work, it's nice to say that Aluna: Sentinel of the Shards is available on PC/Steam and Nintendo Switch!
Aluna as it appears on Nintendo's eShop
There were many aspects of Aluna's development I found rewarding. Working with established characters and creating a new adventure for them is a special kind of challenge I enjoy. And creating vast top-down worlds for the player to explore was engaging. I had to upgrade my PC just to handle our custom RPG Editor! The streaming engine can be extremely demanding when viewing an entire level at once.
Aluna's chunk-based world editing gave us a lot of options on how to lay out the levels. And I enjoyed creating 3d tile sets that could go in any direction, and rise or descend.
Here you can see a massive ziggurat constructed in our engine:
RPG Editor view of a level from Aluna
Same level zoomed in
And here is what it looks like zoomed in a bit closer. The gameplay camera is even closer in.
Reaction to the game has been positive, here is a review:
My favorite part of a new release is getting to watch players stream their gameplay sessions, either live or archived. People may react to different parts of the game in ways you didn't anticipate. It's exciting to see and provides a lot of late-night viewing when I can't sleep.
I meant to post more about Aluna right at release, but I've been swamped with more work since then. I decided to post now on the eve of
GDEX 2021 in case any of my fellow devs are interested in what I've been up to. I plan on attending the con this weekend at the Columbus Convention Center. See you there!
Splash page for GDEX 2021, the local gamedev convention in Columbus, OH
