Kandria
Testing, testing, 1 2 3, this is Kandria...
Another hectic week, with probably yet another to follow immediately after!
Nick
So, this week was mostly spent testing things and fixing bugs. Mostly, anyway. Things are now working, or in the very it's possible to complete the quests we've laid out. However, there's still lots of rough edges and bugs lurking about, and I honestly wish we had another entire month to really get things done.
Still, I feel it's better to focus on just getting what we can fixed and pushing out the updated demo next week as promised. I don't want to delay the monthly update for much longer either. We can focus on more polish and such later once we get to extending the prototype into a 'first chapter demo'.
Anyway, aside from testing and fixing, I've also spent a good deal of time optimising. The game should now run a lot more smoothly on pretty much every system. There's still a huge lot more left to optimise further, but I'll deal with that when we get to it – for now the changes I've made (reducing garbage production, introducing a spatial query structure) should be significant enough to keep us afloat for a while longer.
Aside from that I also had to work on producing new pitching material. As part of that I've rewritten the old pitch doc from last year, though I'll also have to make a new set of slides tomorrow as well. In a most baffling move for myself, I seem to somehow have completely lost the source for the presentation I made back in November.
The reason I'm worrying about pitching is that we were one of 7 teams that ProHelvetia selected for international online platforms. I'm very happy and thankful for that, but I'm also a bit annoyed because there was very little time between us knowing this and the first event, Global Games Pitch, happening. GGP is taking place on Tuesday, so just the day after tomorrow, and I haven't had the time yet to properly practise my pitch.
I love doing presentations and essays, but I don't like pitching much. Something about lacking the self-confidence to embellish my achievements, I suppose. Anyway, this pitching business has had me quite stressed for the past few days, to the point where I couldn't even really use the Easter break that I took for myself to relax. There's also been some family drama and other assorted stress sources, so all in all I'm starting to feel a little burnt.
Whatever the case, I'm going to try my best to not overwork myself coming week. I know all too well that we have a tendency to overwork ourselves in this industry because we really want the game to be the best it can be, but it's also just really not healthy. One of the things I've been really adamant about is to not impose crunch on any one on the team, including myself, and I intend on continuing being adamant about that.
Anyway, you have my word that the demo will be public next weekend, no matter what happens, and I'm really excited to see what people think of it. In many ways it's the first real demo that's going to be published for Kandria, as everything so far has been placeholder work.
Tim
A short week due to the bank holiday, but I fixed some bugs in the first quest, which was blocking progress, and edited the dialogue based on Nick's feedback. I'm confident the quest chain now holds together robustly for our testers. There are some changes we'd like to make to improve the quest logic, especially with the mushrooming quest, so you can freely explore and collect mushrooms at any time. I'll be looking at these kinds of features next week, as well as adding more emote tags for the characters, and continuing to playtest and polish.
Fred
Spent the week mostly tweaking and improving existing stuff. Slowly finding the time to improve and polish the Stranger's anims too. I'm also testing a longer range of attack for basic attacks and quicker actions to see how the flow feels. Might also be more satisfying visually to have a bigger slash with that katana!
That's it for now
See you... space cowboys!
Ps: we've had a lot more activity on our Discord lately, and I'm really happy about that! It's been a lot of fun. Do join us!