Hi everyone! It’s been a while since we last updated you on our development progress and lately, we’ve seen that people are really hyped about the setting our game aims to explore. If you’ve watched GrimSilverse’s “Overnight” animation (you can watch it on youtube) and started dreaming about playing a metroidvania game featuring Hololive’s Advent and Justice members, our project might be what you’re looking for. We are happy to confirm that Shiori’s Novella: Forbidden Ink is still in development and you can expect more frequent updates from now on. 

You might ask us: “Pyshney, why are you guys taking so long? Last time we got to play a jam version of your game was ages ago!” and yes, we are taking our time, but our intention is to make an amazing game that really well represents the IP we are working with. Since our HoloJam debut, we’ve partnered with HelloIT, a science club from our university to help us streamline our workflow and we’ve been hard at work crafting an amazing setup for a game. As a result of that, from the game that could be summarised on two google docs pages, we are currently sitting on around 100 pages of detailed game info that we are slowly bringing into life. 

But we bet you guys would like to see some sneak peeks right? Well then, why don't we start with a concept for the main menu:

Our artists are hard at work and what you just watched is an early visualisation of how the main menu is going to look like (featuring music made by our composer!). We would also like to share with you some concepts for new enemies starting with low-corruption Shiori:

As we have promised in one of our earlier devlogs, we’ll be adding an exciting thing - the ink system to our full release, and this Shiori boss design is a part of said system! You’ll be able to encounter her in this state if you manage to drain Shiori’s magic ink down to the lowest level as you play the game. Note that we’re still finalizing our artstyle and every concept you see is drawn with our artist’s signature style! Next we can move to showing you some progress on the in-game UI side of things. Take a look at this Shiori dialogue box concept and character sketch:

Looking pretty good, don’t you think? Lastly, we’d love to show you some of the new enemies you’ll be able to encounter in our game. We’ll be sticking with the scribble aesthetic for common enemies since it fits our narrative really well. Take a look at some of those sillies we created:

This is all that we wanted to share with you today. We have made a lot of progress on level design, game systems, game UI and much, much more. Our overly ambitious goal is to have an early playtest build by the end of the year so stay tuned for more updates until then! In the next development update we’ll most likely discuss game systems and how we aim to create a sense of replayability and encourage players to explore every corner of our game. Thank you for reading and we hope to see you again soon! ~Team at Pyshney Productions