Hey everyone!

This is Kevin from Team Broodrooster. As you probably know, we recently built and released this game, Heart of the Storm, in a week for the Brackeys game jam 2024.2. Despite the game's fairly obviously unfinished state, we received a tremendous amount of positive feedback and comments, and we've just been blown away by all your positivity. It's been an amazing boost in motivation and confidence for us, and it was such a heartening experience we almost immediately unanimously decided to do another big jam with the same team setup in a few months time. (Piratesoft jam!)

Some of this team have been working on games for a few years now, but this was our first real jam, and our first project in godot. It was our artist's first real foray into game art in general, after working as a graphics designer for years (the amount of nice things he's been hearing from you guys will probably keep him going for many many more months). And we've all learned so much.

For me personally, staying motivated, staying productive, and releasing and finishing projects has always been an issue. But I feel like I really made a lot of mental progress on these issues with this past jam. And seeing people enjoy what I helped make. Well, that makes everything in life feel so much easier. So, thank you.

There are many more things I want to say. But I promised myself I'd at least try to be concise this devlog. So let's move onto the future.

The future of the project

We've decided that this project deserves some more love.  Our trello board was filled with things we still wanted to do and improve. So why not... do them? And maybe this way my inner perfectionist will stop making screaming jungle animal noises at me. 

Sooo we've entered what I'm going to call a "Slow burn" phase. The team is free to work on the project in any capacity they want, and we're loosely going to focus on releasing a (more) finished version of the game in one of the weeks after the jam voting period has ended.

What's coming in the new version? 

Animated enemy art, for one thing! We released the jam version without it, and it hurt us internally a little bit. 

Other than that, we bring many balance improvements, control improvements, UI improvements, tutorial improvements, performance improvements, some bug fixes, general polishing, and we're going to be adding a lot of audio and two music tracks to the game. Also! We'll be adding a cool new feature: an endless mode, which you can opt-in to play after beating the final wave.  The endless mode will allow you to really explore your chosen building's fun end-game upgrades, which a lot of players haven't really been able to really discover yet.

Okay, that's it for this devlog! Thanks for reading! This probably wasn't concise at all, was it? 

Oh well. 

-Team Broodrooster