Hey, Ash here. This time around, in the spirit of the holidays and breaking into the New Year, I’d like to change our format a bit and channel my inner Three Ghosts. As we hit the ground running in 2025, let’s talk about Chrono’s past, present and future.

 

PAST

 

Looking back at Chrono’s beginnings, I would be too kind to say that the goal was just ambitious. Through the help of all of our wonderful donors and community members we were able to make what was essentially a group of people with an idea and dream into a company and a team. In September we hired our developers and got to work getting all of our foundational code and database setup squared away. But at the same time we planned out our UI and out-of-match screens, we continued working on beta art to replace our AI images, we got some more official art, a board concept was created, we had some reddit posts do pretty well and overall, it’s been going about as smooth as it can go on the development side of things. It really should be said that Joel and Tony, our front -and-back-end developers, deserve a round of applause on the work that has been done so far. We’ve had stumbles, like every team and project to ever exist, but with our nose on the grindstone we haven’t really stopped running.

 

PRESENT 

 

If you’re reading this though, you’ve probably read our previous updates and are looking for what’s happening now. As you can imagine, we all took some time off for the holidays. Before that though, much of our Rules Engine has been tightened up. This is pretty much what it sounds like and is the rulebook for the game. Technically, the Rules Engine actually is the game, but it runs in the background while you control it on the front end. It’s not finished yet but we’ve properly integrated many of the zones that are a part of Chrono including (but not limited to) the deck, the hand, the graveyard and the Diver Zone. We’ve even implemented a couple of decks into the game for us to play around with, however the actual Deck Builder hasn’t begun construction. The Client is also now more aware of the game state. It gets notified when anything happens on the Server, in a way that doesn't give away your secrets (ie, when you draw a card your opponent is simply told "PlayerX drew Card: UNKNOWN_CARD").

 

We’ve also further implemented card animations such as when you play a card. We started exploring different animating options including using plugins and frame-by-frame animation using the basic game loop. We finally settled on using DOTween because it is easy to control and flexible with animation adjustments. There are also small various bug fixes and improvements to how cards handle hover and dragging. All this is to say that next month is gonna be a big one as we will likely have a playable Developer Demo version of the game. It’ll be ugly and be missing a bunch of features, but for the people on the team like me who’s only experience with C++ is a high school report card, it’ll be playable. 

 

FUTURE

 

To clarify, much like the Ghost of Christmas’ Future, this section is not a promise or guarantee. Many things can change throughout a game’s development cycle and I don’t want to be hanged by my optimism.

 

As far as the coding side of things in our development we are on track to hold our planned Alpha release for sometime around April. As I said previously, we should have an internal playable version of the game soon and that’s very exciting. We are all mentally preparing to focus on creating the game and resist just jamming games on the dev client. We are producing some sound and music for the game, including voice lines. The flavor text for our core set is nearly finished and really, it’d only take one or two inspired afternoons to wrap it up. There are even some things I’m not allowed to tell you about! That’s my least favorite type of thing! The game is coming together in most aspects. We do have one big issue though.

 

It's art. To some of you this may not be a surprise. We’re very lucky to be having Beiki come back for another round of art in January, and we are working on a few other ways to get some art for cards that will hopefully catch some traction after this holiday season subsides. You may also know that we are also drawing or painting some art ourselves to have some Slay the Spire-esque beta art to replace our AI placeholder images by the time we release our Alpha. However, we also need art for “little” things like menu assets, board assets, animations, and icons. All this is to say that we’re working on it, but it often feels like the main thing holding us back.

 

Also something you may see more of in 2025 is gonna be marketing. When our gameplay gets more solidified you’ll see a Steam page (that you’ll wishlist) with a trailer (which you’ll share) and more YouTube videos (which you’ll love)! In the spirit of community and my Chrono/Connections addiction, I’ve also made a little something for you! You can test your Chrono knowledge here.

 

Finally, that concludes this month’s update. Remember last month when I said it would be a short one? Oh, how naive I was. Thank you all for joining us once again and have a Happy New Year!