Happy Holidays everyone! It’s been a hell of a year for team Kinky Fridays, we have been hard at work smashing out Sapphire Safari for you all and honestly, we are so close to crossing into the beta territory (beta as in, base mainline mechanics are all operational and now we focus on extra mechanics and main content). We have never been this confident in our game and it is all for one reason alone.

Narrative.

Yes, that age-old wiggle stick of a word has reappeared. In Sapphire Safari, narrative means a pretty simple Point A to Point B while collecting this and that type of system. It does not need to be complicated, but we have designed a system to distract the player from that experience. Which is what the last couple of years have been focused on. Internally we call it the Three Pillar Experience, three core mechanical systems designed to pull players from one another. 

• Narrative (main quests, side quests). 
• Exploration (mystories, puzzles, travel). 
• Collection (monsutra, monpedia, collectables, expedition logs).

Anyway long intro short, we have built many of those systems already, with the final pieces being the Main Quest and Expedition Logs being built right now. So that's what this Sapphire Issue is about! Told you it was a long intro…

For myself and the team, the narrative is less about the words said, and more about the vibe and atmosphere set. We wanted to show this straight from the get-go, hitting New Game will now push players into the Introduction Cutscene. It establishes the trio of characters (Frida, Jamie, and Oscar) arriving at Sapphire Island and goes through character selection.

Followed by their disembarking and a quick refresher on how to do basic photography, which you can skip if you're skilled already.

This tutorial was a huge pain to get right, we worked on timings, UI elements, UX feedback, positioning of assets within the environment, built new systems, and put together new SFX and jingles just to ensure it all worked out!

Lastly, the narrative elements dip their toes into directing the players into correctly activating the Campsite Core Beacon, which was a pain point for some users. Our final piece yet to be made is the Expedition Log unveiled at the end of this quest, which will hopefully push players into seeking them out around the playable space.

After all that is done, we will be locking off the narrative content until we launch on Steam on March 7th next year, as our focus will go into polishing and bug-fixing the content we want to display first and foremost. So we hope the meager portion of narrative content will give everyone a look into the quality we aim to hit and the mystery of the island to uncover!

For now, we are gonna take some time to relax over Christmas, and we hope you all do the same as well! One final piece of encouragement though.

If you are running into a bug that crashes your game because you completed the Rune Stone Mystery Tablet, we know what is causing it and a fix will come within the next patch. For now, you can simply set your view distance to “Epic” in the game options and it will no longer crash.

Merry Christmas and Happy Gaming!