court-of-fools

[court-of-fools]

BACK IN BUSINESS! HOPEFULLY!

Hello hi yes I'm sooooo sorry it's been like. Three???? (what is time) years since anything substantial is happening. Long story short, I got knocked aside by a lot of health issues, as well as a hyperfixation taking hold for a surprisingly long time.

But! It's finally waning and I'm finally in a state where I feel mostly normal again, so! A small little update of what's what!

I (and the rest of the team) will be returning to working on the world that Court of Fools takes place in. Admittedly it will largely be Just Me for a good bit, I need to get my gamedev shoes broken back in, and figure out how I want to tackle things.

That being said, Court of Fools will not be the focus right now. Don't get me wrong, I love it, I KNOW there's stuff I could tweak and improve in the demo alone, BUT. Gonna start smaller. Ease myself back in.

As I said, we'll still be in the same world that Court of Fools takes place in, so have no worries--We'll likely be doing work on a smaller game or two before jumping into that big ol' ocean. Samson and Dell will be what we focus on for right now, and it will be a lot less dense than Court of Fools hopes to be.

As for how we're going to do that: Simply put, the community server is going to go on a small little silent period as the devs do things behind the scenes and not for the open eye, just to sort of take that aspect of 'performance' off of what we do and hopefully get us a lot more focused. I will share occasional visual development to my ko-fi supporter server, but those will probably be rather sparse.

The community server will still be open, technically, and people can still go there, I guess, but I wouldn't really go into it expecting a hub of activity. The very most you'll see from us dev is probably just community moderation duties. So--You choice to be there, but not really recommended at the moment.

I had resolved to do all this once the new year had started, so here's to keeping the momentum for the new year!

So yeah, that's about it: We're not dead, we are still gonna do stuff, it's simply the whims of life that bogged us (mainly me) down.

Major updates and things will be posted here for the time being, since twitter/X is... Yeah.

See you around!

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hi i haven't abandoned or forgotten the game by any means, but life, health, and other fixations have impacted my work on things so uh. yeah.

anyway, take this white boy as consolation. it's his birthday.

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Hello! I was wondering, Is the discord still active? And can anyone join it or is there some sort of requirement for entering?

The discord is still open and has people in it, yes! The join link should be in our pinned post (I recall recently Discord made it so new links made can't be set as Forever active now, but it SHOULD be a link made before then and still work, let me know if not)

Things are a little quiet on the development end, admittedly, because I've had a very busy summer--and still kind of do. But once I clear a few more things off my plate, I'm hoping to get back into the swing of things to work on Samson and Dell!

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Some art I've done for Court of Fools! I have an obvious favorite

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Happy April 1st!!

Can you believe it's been a whole year since the demo was first released?

Even if development has slowed down a little bit, I'm really happy people like the project so far, and hope you'll stick around as time goes on and see where things go.

To celebrate, a bunch of people in the discord server joined together to make a little collab pic of the main cast!

Credits below the cut~

Greg, Caramilla, Blacktooth - @asimplechaos

Jacques, Pragma - @zyhod

Inky, Aces High, Aces Low - @sulky-seli

Masque, Umi, Green Bean - @abraca-mari

Leau - bovinelimbs

Vega, Yona - @nellas-art

Francois, Barisol, Bruna - @feralunar

Viidra - @feyvagabond

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Been sitting on a tweet that said to draw Miku as a character in your original world, and well, it's Miku Day, so. Cumulun Miku.

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Feburary monthly doodle requests!

First we have Greg doing some gardening, something he definitely set aside time for and was looking forward to.

Then there's Barisol and Bruna--The prompt specifically was 'crackship for Valentines' month', and I think these two would get along. The date activity is laughing at you.

Finally, we have ideas for Estelle, one of my other OCs, as if she were in the CoF world. The obvious choice for her, regardless of logistics, would be Stellaxi/Ifrid hybrid, lol, though I did do quick ideas for Lapaquin and Cumulun as well.

To see doodle requests as they're completed, feel free to join the server (linked in pinned)

To make your own requests, you can join my ko-fi as a monthly supporter to gain access to the request form!

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Things are going smoothly for the anniversary project that was talked about before, so here's a little preview of the characters I've drawn for it!

Applications are closed, but if you want first look at the piece when it's finished, feel free to join the server, which is linked in the pinned post!

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Guess what's coming up soon!! Yeah, it's the anniversary of Court of Fools!

With a little over a month to go, I'm hosting an interest check on if people would like to contribute to a sort of community collab picture!

Join the discord server to see the form, the link is in our pinned post!!

[court-of-fools]

Guess what's coming up soon!! Yeah, it's the anniversary of Court of Fools!

With a little over a month to go, I'm hosting an interest check on if people would like to contribute to a sort of community collab picture!

Join the discord server to see the form, the link is in our pinned post!!

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Later in the month it'll be the lunar new year, and year of the rabbit! So, a fun lil doodle of Umi, everyone's favorite sea bunny gal!

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Only just now discovering I never actually posted this particular doodle request from a couple months back, soooo here it is in its own post!

The request was for Jacques as a Volvendi, and I couldn't help but slap a Barisol in there too, oops.

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Time for another little dump of concept work!

1-3. Design work for the main antagonist Samson and Dell will have to go up against: A vampire by the name of Bestogne ('best-own'). Vampires don't have a typical appearance in Torja, with really their only major trait being pronounced fangs, so it's hard to tell if any one individual is a vampire from a glance. I have no idea what her race is like or even called, I was mainly playing with shapes when creating her.

4 is a dumb memey doodle I did to try and get a proper pin on Samson and Sio's dynamic, as Samson essentially works for Sio. With Sio doing their best to try and show Samson that not all gods are bad and Samson digging his heels every opportunity... They're definitely a strained duo.

5-8. As Samson and Dell takes place before the events of CoF, it's very likely I may have the two interact with characters from CoF. I only want to do a couple at the most, but deciding who is definitely going to be challenging, as there are several characters that would be interesting to see from this perspective. Samson and Dell won't solve the problems of these characters, but would certainly have a major impact on their character.

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A small backlog of doodle requests from the discord server, for people like @modern-masquerade, @abraca-mari, Steakatron on twitter, and @nellariboo!

If you'd like to see progress on Samson and Dell, you can join the discord server linked in pinned!

If you'd like your own monthly doodle request, you can become a member on my kofi!

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More concept work from the past couple of days.

Concept for visual keys, thinking about how the game's gonna look

Needed to make a quick gif of Samson to test something. This ended up being a whole thing and basically like three different versions of him blinking exist, but we figured something out in the end

Current draft for Samson's bio

Doodle of Samson using his magic

Mockup of how things might look in-game, figuring out the text box aesthetic and how sprites might look

(and 7) Avillbe and Hoisou are the gods of Answers and Questions respectively. They also have strong ties to Sio, and are usually found around their library, so it would make sense for them to appear at some point. I highly doubt the game will be difficult enough to warrant detailed tutorial and hint systems, but they would be the perfect characters to be in charge of them, due to how naturally they can relay things to the player and still remain in-character.

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Concept work for Samson and Dell, most of it whipped up today.

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Important update!! Please read the dev log on itch.io!