Havoc Studios
July 2021 Newsletter
Moving Forward with Funding
In the aftermath of our Kickstarter campaign, we have been plotting and planning our next moves for Havoc Fox’s development. Progress has been moving swiftly and we’re very excited for what the future holds!
Havoc Fox Kickstarter Results
(Artwork by @cyansorcery)
We are very excited to say that the Havoc Fox Kickstarter was a resounding success! In the end, our total was $21,792.40, just shy of 9% more than our target goal of $20,000! None of our stretch goals were met, but surpassing our target has been a major success for our development process. In the time following the campaign, we have been hard at work preparing our budget and managing our resources. Development on Havoc Fox will be much faster with all of the extra help we’ll be bringing in!
With the goal reached, we have begun discussing the pledge rewards. We have already received many of your descriptions and visual references for the cameos and will be responding to them soon. We will work with you to ensure they’re presented in a way that pleases you while still adhering to our guidelines for inclusion in Havoc Fox. For those of you who have beta access, we have sent out invites to join our Discord server for beta testing! We should have some new builds for you to play in August, so make sure you join the community! For the rest of you, your digital game copies, artbooks, and soundtracks will be awarded upon Havoc Fox’s release, so be sure to follow our newsletters, updates, and social media for more information!
Now that Kickstarter is behind us, we’re focusing on our next project: SAGE 2021. For those of you who are unfamiliar, SAGE (Sonic Amateur Games Expo) is an online game expo that hosts plenty of indie and fan games on one large server. Havoc Fox has appeared at SAGE the past two years, making 2021 its third appearance. SAGE 2021 begins on August 21st, and we’ll show off a new demo for the occasion. We hope to see you there!
With our Kickstarter campaign behind us, we’re quickly moving forward to our next goal. Thank you all once again for making it a success!
Current Development Update
This month, we continued to make progress on the Express.
Our main priority right now is finishing up the next stage: Ethereal Express. The scene above is a short snippet from the preceding cutscene, the first of which will differ between Grey and Venice’s separate stories. This similar-but-different theme between each campaign will continue through future stages and scenes as well to give both stories their own identity, ensuring that both Grey and Venice are the main characters of their respective playthroughs.
Ethereal Express is the first stage shared by both Grey and Venice, offering different challenges due to their different play styles. We recently programmed Venice into the stage and will begin working on her routing for the stage soon!
Some parts of the stage are going to be dark, requiring Grey to light his way. To accommodate this, we’ve added a dynamic lighting/shadowing effect to parts of the stage! The effect is purely cosmetic and will not affect gameplay, but it looks cool! Should this affect your system’s processing in a negative way, the effects will have a toggle in the options menu to help reduce lag and other issues.
Aside from Ethereal Express, we’ve been working on a few changes to the overall gameplay. Shown above is an example of how different attacks will affect enemies upon defeat. The more powerful your attack, the farther away the enemy will fly! Additionally, you may have noticed that the HUD has been updated as well. The top meter is thicker and now shows your active special attack as an icon on its left. The bottom meter is more clearly defined as your health with heart indicators.
We have also laid the foundation for the next stage after Ethereal Express, but we won’t be discussing that at the moment. Follow our social media pages for further updates, and be sure to check out our next demo when SAGE rolls around later this month!
Community Spotlight - You!
In each edition of the Havoc Studios monthly newsletter, we will highlight the works and/or relations of a member from the community or studio. We are grateful for everyone within the community and would like to recognize those of you who help bring life to the community. Our July community spotlight features, well, you!
This month is dedicated to everyone in the Havoc Studios community. Whether you’ve been here since the beginning, jumped in from SAGE, found us through Kickstarter, or are reading this as your introduction to our studio, we could never hope to do all this without you. Havoc Fox has been a labor of love for many years, but it was your help and support that helped it grow into something much greater.
Thank you so much for your support, and we hope that Havoc Fox will become everything you’re looking for! With Kickstarter in the past, we should resume our regular community spotlights in the future!
That's all for now!
Havoc Fox’s development is our sole priority from here on out! If you haven't already, be sure to follow us on Twitter @havocfoxgame. Join the conversation on the official Discord server. Support us on Patreon! Check out the original soundtrack and development live streams on our YouTube channel! Like us on Facebook and Instagram!
Thank you for reading the July edition of the Havoc Fox Newsletter. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we hope to see you again in August!