A New Direction For Hello Again

It's time to announce some big changes!

Greetings from Soup Island! It’s my great pleasure to announce some huge updates to Hello Again!

NOTE: All of the following announcements are still heavily under construction and subject to change.

New Pitch, New Cast, New Vibe

If you’re not familiar, Hello Again is a time-looping puzzle adventure game which takes huge inspiration from other time loop games like Outer Wilds. Throughout the game’s development, I’ve struggled to define this game’s pitch with precise wording that leaves a strong impression. Sure, I could say “it’s a cute time loop” or “it’s like Outer Wilds but with an emphasis on social interaction”, but I’ve found that these phrases fail to give an immediate picture of what the game actually is for the average person. After all, who (besides me) even knows what Outer Wilds is, let alone played it? As a result, I feel like it’s been hard for this game to spread via word-of-mouth. My Steam wishlist count certainly reflects this. Something about the pitch has just felt off.

As I was soul-searching and trying to find a stronger foundation for the game, I was reminded of one of my earliest inspirations for this project: Animal Crossing. I always wanted a game with challening, satisfying puzzles (a la Outer Wilds) but endearing, silly characters and a laid-back atmosphere (a la Animal Crossing). So I recently decided to go back to my roots and reconnect the game to some of my earliest ideas.

In light of this, I now present the new cast of Hello Again! They’re animals now!

The new character designs I created (ignore the fact that they don’t have bodies yet)

The new pitch for Hello Again is that it’s “the ferret time loop game”. You play as a cute lil’ ferret who goes around chatting with villagers and solving clockwork puzzles in the world’s coziest time loop. I have no idea if this new pitch will move the marketing needle, but it certainly feels closer to my original dream for this project.

The characters’ in-game sprites

Everyone’s favorite characters from the demo are still here, keeping their names and general personalities. But more expressive character designs will aid me in communicating their personalities better. This redesign also gave me an opportunity to re-examine certain characters and tweak them to better fit the story I’m trying to tell. For instance, Gus and his wife Lois were smushed into one character, combining into some kind of MEGA-GUS (he still just goes by “Gus” though).

To be clear, the premise of the game has changed very little. The mechanics have not changed at all. There will be no “life sim” or “farming sim” elements in this game, aside from social interactions with NPCs. The Animal Crossing influence only covers the vibe of the game, not its core gameplay.

Art Style

The general art style of the game has changed very little, mostly because I’m a big fan of it as it is. The biggest shift is that I’m working on sanding off rough edges and refining what’s already there. Here are some concrete ways that’s played out recently.

First, I reworked the game’s tilemaps to eliminate all the rough edges that used to be all over the game.

The image on the left is an example of how rough the edges used to be. Look at all those corners! The image on the right is an example of the new, smoothed-out tilemap. Much better!

Second, I updated the game’s color scheme. I reduced the saturation of the orange and yellow to make them less grating, and I added a slight gradient that travels up the screen, giving the colors an added feeling of depth. I also added a diagonal line pattern to help distinguish which areas are unable to be walked on.

Notice the slight gradient going from the top of the screen to the bottom? And see the diagonal patterns on the tops of the ruins?

With this color scheme update, I can shift the colors to an entirely new palette in certain circumstances. Here’s the “cave color scheme”:

Cave colors!

Third, I’ve been reworking the character’s animations to be smoother. I’ve learned that animating a funny lil’ ferret guy to run at a high speed is very difficult. The animation needs a bit more tweaking, but I think I’ve nearly solved it at this point.

Fourth, I’m working on conveying texture better in the world. This is something I haven’t had as much time to work on, but I think it will help greatly with rounding out the game’s art. I want a rocky cliff to look like a rocky cliff, a derelict ruin to look like it’s falling apart, and a wavy ocean to have some kind of waves.

A rocky cliff prop I made to add texture to the beach cliffs

Fifth, I’ve been playing around with some bolder ideas which are very promising, but I’m not sure if they’ll be possible given my techincal limitations and timeline. I’ll make sure to show them off in the future if I get them working!

A wavy, hand-drawn shader effect that I’ve been experimenting with

Miscellaneous Changes

Here’s a bunch of other recent changes:

If you didn’t read my previous blog post, the whole game has been radically descoped to be more manageable (and finishable) for me as a solo dev. This unfortunately meant I had to cut some of my favorite puzzle ideas. But who knows — if I’m still having fun with time loops by the time this game is done, maybe I’ll make some DLC! Unlikely, but possible :)

In light of this descope, I reworked my production plan and set some pretty aggressive deadlines. I’ve been feeling dangerously close to burnout recently, so I’m going to try and be a little less intense about development for the next few weeks, but I’m still hopeful that development will progress speedily this year.

I redesigned the first 20 minutes of the game to tutorialize the time loop in a more contained area, in the hopes of engaging players more effectively.

The main character is now an unnamed silent protagonist. They’re also a postal worker instead of an intern. Instead of coming to the island of Mychaea to study under the famed archaeologist Weston, they’re simply here to deliver a package to him.

Nearly all of the game’s menus have been redesigned.

New UI designs

I’ve been working on getting full controller support implemented into the game so that you could play without ever touching a mouse (which was not previously possible). It’s gonna be a while before the controller system is fully operational, but I’m very happy with progress so far.

I’m overhauling how dialogue is handled on the back-end so that I can write and edit much faster than before. Plus, this new dialogue system will allow for easy translation into other languages, should that need arise. This will be a TON of work, but it will probably save me literal months of development time.

And last but not least, the island itself is getting shuffled around, shrunk, and generally reworked to account for the descoped design plan.

The new island layout, roughly sketched in Photoshop. This is extremely under construction…

Conclusion

Thanks for reading and for supporting me along this lengthy journey. The end is in sight, I just have to stick to my plan and persevere. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll check in with another monthly update giving a more in-depth look at what my next steps are for development.

Thanks,
Dwight