Spooky Starlets: Movie Maker [v1.5][TinyHat Studios]

That being said- IF YOU LIKED THE GAME PRIOR TO THIS UPDATE, YOU CAN STILL PLAY THAT VERSION!
If you click the gear across from the game’s launch button, go into properties, then build branches- you can opt into the “legacy” build which is the previous version of the game, with all of your save data intact. Achievements should be untouched and compatible between versions. Big changes are scary, and we want to make sure we aren’t taking away what you already own or enjoy. However with that cleared up, let’s get into an overview of what’s new!

UPDATED CARD GAMEPLAY:
Even after 1.0, we repeatedly heard back from players that the card gameplay was confusing and that they didn’t quite understand what was going on. We revisited the card gameplay to make the goals more clear, to make the feedback to the player’s actions more obvious, and to hopefully make the gameplay loop all around feel more rewarding and fun- while still keeping the “low stakes,” feel of the original.

UPDATED STORY PROGRESSION:

Previously, if you wanted to advance a starlet’s story, you would have to draw her card and earn stars with her. Now instead, stars are a general currency that you can use to unlock the various stories. This should hopefully help create a more consistent gameplay > story > gameplay > story flow that improves the game’s overall pacing. Additionally, the new map screen is also where you can choose to take on upgrades/enhancements that give you more options in how to approach the card based gameplay.

UPDATED VISUAL PRESENTATION:
We worked with Hasselnut on getting a couple of new & improved assets in, such as the various stage backgrounds, which have been brought in line to be more consistent with the art style in general. A big one however are the brand new, hand-animated, frame-by-frame animations used in the card gameplay section. Many folks had complained about the quality of the previous “puppet” animations. We originally wanted to allow for more mixing and matching of characters, but we have not been satisfied with a method that both allows us to keep things modular, but also looks good within a 2D animation pipeline.

Thus, the card gameplay animations are, we feel, much improved, but only feature the generic ghost guy/girl characters. This is the compromise we’ve reached, given that each unique character already has their own animated story CGs. We would like to revisit a proper modular system at some point, but we feel that is only possible with 3D models- and thus it is something we will be exploring more in Spooky Starlets 2. (More on that at some point in the future, but it is being worked on and this update has been vital in us exploring what can be done with the game’s design space.)

QUALITY OF LIFE:
We’ve also gone ahead and done our best to add more options and features to the game where possible- such as text speed configuration. We’ve received a lot of feedback with the original game on things that players wanted to have access to, so we’ve tried to include as much of it as we can.

All in all? We sincerely hope you like these changes & updates. We are still open to feedback and of course, will be keeping an eye out for the next couple of week to address any bug reports that crop up. While we’ve done our best to thoroughly test things, this has been an absolutely huge endeavor and having some extra eyes pour over this new version of the game will help us continue to refine it even more!

While there are many big, broad, sweeping changes here- at the end of the day we want to make sure the version of the game we are providing is the best possible version that is the most enjoyable for the most people- please let us know what you think and we will do our best to take your input into consideration!

2022-07-01

2020-11-13
v0.8 Beta