Some thoughts about the Skin Deep demo
Seen some folks remarking on how easy it is. Yes, it's way easier than the rest of the game! It's the tutorial and the first level. The rest of the game does get way harder and more chaotic. The last few levels are so large and chaotic that I still find them challenging. (Partially this is because I play them a different way every time.)
The levels are not procedurally generated! There is no procgen in the game. All the levels are handmade by Suzanne Will and Tynan Wales.
The voice actors in the demo are Samia Mounts (Nina), Brad Davidorf (Palanka), Anna Vocino (Pirate A), Chester Rushing (Pirate B), Daisy Lightfoot (Fannish Pirate) and Janellen Steininger (Ship Voice). There are more voice actors in the final game. Our cast delivered extremely powerful material!! This was a union record... I recommend working with SAG! Brendon was shocked by how easy and pleasant our first few records were with Samia, and I told him, "This is why I wanted union talent so bad. Always hire a pro!!" If you saw our earlier gameplay trailer, Janellen Steininger was the narrator for that trailer. It was very cool to get her back!
Here's the dev timeline for Skin Deep: Brendon started prototyping the game in 2018 and made the 2018 trailer so that people would be aware he was doing this. However, he was working on the game only part time, and spending most of his time doing level design and art for Sub Rosa. He went full-time in 2020 and sought a publisher. We ended up signing with Annapurna in 2021, and after this point he was able to hire the team up and begin proper full-time, full-team-size development on the game. I personally did not begin working on the story until 2020, and my first completed story outline is from April 2021, which is I think after we signed with Annapurna. I know it can seem sometimes like when a game is announced there must be someone or several someones who sit down to work on it 8 hours a day, every day... this is not always the case! I wrote recently about how hard it is to pay for your life with indie games. This sometimes means doing other work, doing multiple jobs, or working on something only a few days a week. We were very lucky to be able to pay for a whole team of cool people on this game, and I consider that to be the point in time when the game properly "entered production" rather than pre-production. The transition from pre-pro to production is pretty significant at a lot of big game dev studios, and "are we in production?" is a question I associate with big-studio game development... but it was also a significant change for us.