MegaMare X — Your queen who powers the night. Prepare for a...

August brings with it a development update! And it’s a special one, because it’s been almost exactly 3 years since MegaMare X made its debut at BronyCon 2013. So it’s a tech-demo anniversary update.

But first to the development at hand. Summertime for most of our team members, with its sunshine and baking temperatures, has brought with it an unusual set of personal situations. July was especially slow due to this, which, while not good for making progress, doesn’t mean that we’re at a standstill.

We have another alpha update, our 103rd, and a related second in the pipeline for additional bugs, fixes, and scripting support. Our present goal continues toward building out some small pieces of the content for the main portion of the game, and then we are moving on to further design and content milestones. These next milestones to reach will delve into the final stages, their bosses, and the unfolding plot therein. While some decisions need to still be made, the coming months will have some answers and a rough completion of the alpha.

We’ve come so far, and there’s more to do, but let’s go back 3 years to August 2013 to when our tech demo first hit the public!

Our team decided to get together and setup all we had on a table at BronyCon. MegaMare X had only been in development since the end of 2012 – but we were able to make a somewhat rushed (and often buggy) tech demo that made us realize just how much people enjoyed what we had created.

It was at a peak time during the fandom, and among other activities around us, we held down a table for the full three days over in the Salt Block Lounge. Helping everyone get a turn, listening and recording your feedback, and discussing where things might go.

It may have been a small table, but it often drew a crowd.

This was an exhilarating part of our early development that the team remembers fondly. Not only did it bring us together, but we had an overwhelmingly positive response to the demo, which encouraged us to dive into making the full game.

Looking back over the 3 years since, we’ve continued to have wonderful interactions with our fans. You guys help us keep this project going, and we couldn’t be more thankful for your support.

Did you know you can see the tech demo? We had an exclusive MegaMare X demo review by Phoe if you’re looking to check out what it was like back then:

After a slow period during the summertime months, development has picked up following the joining of some new team members. We’ve welcomed @shinsart​ and Xujints to our ranks and they’re off to a good start. Shintari, as a sprite/pixel artist, has already begun making tilesets, while Xujints has begun on the dialogue and is helping with game design.

Spurred-on by by these team additions, we have produced three more alpha versions and are up to 106. These add placements for some missing items, change the intro boss, fix various gameplay issue, and improve our scripting capabilities for cutscenes. We just completed recent work on our underwater stage’s layout, and finished parts of our upgraded armor sprites, of which half are in-game already. A number of new intro cutscenes have been added, with more cutscenes in progress for the armor parts hidden among the stages.

Now that the exciting stuff you wanted to hear about is over, here’s some boring details on the team’s overall status:

Some of the slowness has been due to a lack of availability with the volunteer nature of the project. So, over the past couple months, we’ve been working with individual members to reduce the amount of churn. Although we are still lacking some of the needed talents for the amount of pixel art the game requires, we hope speed of work will pick-up gradually and be more reliable for continued development. There is also some hold-up with game-design decisions for latter parts of the game that are only roughly written out. So iterations are now in-progress on finalizing details to move those forward.

TLDR: We’re still at it, but nothing looks good in screenshots yet. But it will soon with our new team members!