Rise Of The Jemhaji Devlog #4

Hello all! We know that we’ve been super quiet the past couple months, but rest assured we have been busy. It’s been a while since we last released a devlog so today we want to share with you where we are with the development of Rise Of The Jemhaji and some exciting studio developments.

Current State of Development

Big progress has been made on the game - yay! Many things have been completed since the last devlog and we want to walk you through what has actually been done and what’s left to do:

Saving: So far, everything that needs to be saved is saving! This has been done using a mix of PlayerPrefs and a basic database. Items that have now saved include the Inventory, your selected class and progress. Not everything is currently saved as it hasn’t been implemented yet (we’ll discuss that in a bit), but now that we know how to go about this it will be super simple to do. You will also be able to delete your current save data and start the game over again should you wish to.

Class-specific gear: When you pick your character class, you will be given class-specific gear to battle the foes you will encounter in game. Each class will be different, therefore different gear will have different stats. These stats will soon be applied to the character to affect damage and defence stats, improving your chances of winning combat encounters.

Safezones: The second main area, the safezones, are almost completed. Currently NPC dialogue is implemented, so you’ll be able to hear from the different characters of the game to learn more about the trials and tribulations of Eridani. Next to implement is item gathering where you’ll be able to collect mushrooms, fish, wood, ore and fruits for the crafting system.

Mechanical Redesigns: The reason that we have taken so long to update you all on where we are at is due to redesigning the way the game works. We have made the decision that, for now, we won’t have a questing system. This was a difficult decision to make, however it was made mainly due to the expected file size of the game (all data will be saved to the device rather than on a server somewhere). Even though this may take away what would’ve been a nice part of the game to have, we believe that doing this will make Rise Of The Jemhaji more accessible to the casual mobile market, as well as still be appealing to players who prefer some RPG elements. We hope to bring questing back in the future, but for now the story of Eridani will be told through NPC interactions at the safezones.

Finishing Touches: We have some final things to do, but once these are done we will be releasing a small pilot/alpha build to a private group of friends, family and other trusted people. These things include tutorial UI, hooking up experience points and levelling, adding some juice to the combat scenarios and finalising items and stats by applying these as damage and defence modifiers. We have also been working with a sound designer over the past few months to add some life to the game, so we will be adding those in and giving you sneak peeks of the assets in the near future.

Artwork Updates

Below are some of the latest pieces of artwork that we have received from our talented art team. The assets for this stage of development are almost complete and they will be released in full in our public Beta coming later this year (fingers crossed)!

NPC Asset by Zoe

UI Asset by Eloise

Dravu Asset by Zoe

UI Asset by Eloise

Studio Updates

One thing that we have been working on in the background is a Discord server for the studio, how exciting! We’ll be inviting the team to the server first just to make sure everything is all good, then we will be opening it up to all of you. Within the server you will be able to chat with the team behind Rise Of The Jemhaji, receive updates on the studio, and find out more about how to get involved with testing. In the future we will also be inviting Crowdfunding backers from our planned campaign so they can get exclusive updates!

We hope that you’re as excited about these developments as we are! Updates have kind of stagnated recently, and for that we apologise, but we hope that this devlog has cleared up where we’re at. We’ll be slowly getting back into the swing of things with our socials, so be sure to follow us on those to see the next set of developments with our studio and Rise Of The Jemhaji!