As we move towards the end of the year here, Team Comet has been working to polish off chapter 1 so in 2024 we can focus on chapter 2.

Let me show you what we’ve been working on…

New Scenes for the Intro and Night Time Transition.

Previously, Comet opened in Stella’'s room. We turn the page and she’s standing there. A simple text book greeted you.

Something needed to be done.

I specifically wanted a solution that remained low effort as there's still plenty to build in the game.

With the art we already had on hand, I was able to make the assets for the waking animation and abrupt wake up. Will wrote up some intriguing dream thoughts and Drew scripted it.

I'm much happier with the result.

I'm not a great animator so I actually used powerpoint to animate the final result!

1. Fly in alongside a shrink
2. Screen capture with ScreenToGif then trim the ends
3. Imported the result into Aseprite, then I cropped & touched up a few bits

Given that we’d coded this already we thought it would be wise to tune up another cutscene, later on in the chapter where we transition to night time.

Death and Respawn Updates

We now have our death and respawn animations in. Keeping it simple and flexible, but adding some flavor with random emojis each time you respawn.

Updated Dark Layer Art

Comet is a game about being afraid of the dark and using your light to solve puzzles so most of it takes place at night. 

We haven’t shown a lot of night time gameplay for a few reasons, a big one being: we still had temp artwork for the night layer (how each asset shows up at night, and how Stella’s torch interacts with them).

My art skills are getting better but I tend to stick to simple solid lines when it comes to assets. . 

Now that the level design is locked, it was time to take a different approach with the night time outlines.

What do you think?

Panels Cutscene

A goal I had for Comet was for chapter 1 to really capture the player’s attention. Start strong, ya know?

As a part of that, I wanted the ‘inciting incident’ to have a big budget cutscene, just like PS1 RPGs.

There are a few ways we could’ve done that on Playdate but my hope was to have an interactive comic using Panels, a Playdate framework. (Made famous in Cadin Batrack’s game, The Botanist)

I’m pleased to say we’ve started using Panels and it’s going great, however we’re not ready to show anything off just yet…

… But here’s a sneak peek!

Credit to @xmenekai for working with us to create our Panels

Vote for Comet!

Right now the Playdate Community awards are going on. If you’ve liked our devlogs, gifs, or screenshots we would love it if you would vote for Comet in question 13, Most Anticipated Game.

(Hot tip, If you’ve already voted, you can actually go back and edit your response)

Vote now!

Thank you
Team Comet ❤️