Kandria
Planning the next steps for Kandria
I tried to take it easy this week, but unfortunately things weren't so kind to me.
The first reason for this was that there was still some work left for Eternia, namely making a trailer. That part at least went pretty well, especially with the voice over in. Have a look:
But, what really caused stress was the last thing on the list: getting the game approved by Steam so we could actually put it live on Monday as intended.
Steam has a mandatory approval process before you can sell your game, where a Valve employee has to manually test your game and verify that the features you advertise on the store page, such as captions, controller support, etc. actually work as intended.
This is actually really great and I'm glad that this review exists, and is even as detailed as it is. Unfortunately there's some catches as well, it takes a couple of days for them to get to it, so if you need to go through it multiple times, a week flies by pretty fast. The review you get back is also not typed up by a human, but is rather an automated report generated from the tester ticking some boxes, so it can be a bit confusing to figure out what the correct course of action is.
Eternia failed the review three times, and is currently stuck in the queue. This is bad, of course, because I doubt it'll get reviewed again in time for the intended release. Now, I'm in no way blaming Valve for this – all the review failures are my fault: first I submitted a failing build because I made a small last minute 'fix' that turned out to be breaking. Second, I had advertised "full controller support" despite the game not being fully navigatable via controller. I knew this was the case, but had forgotten I had preemtively selected that option. After that I scaled it down to "partial controller support", but had misunderstood what exactly that meant. Apparently "partial controller support" means the core game still has to be fully playable with a controller, with only menus being exempt.
These reviews typically also came late in the evening or at night, so I either had a very stressful evening scrambling to change and fix things, or had a rude awakening with the first email in my inbox. Needless to say it hasn't been great for me.
Anyway, Eternia is playable with a controller now, so hopefully the review isn't going to fail a fourth time... regardless though I expect the game is going to come out on Tuesday the earliest, so I hope you can spare some more of your patience.
Nick - Fixing, planning
Now, on to Kandria. This week was supposed to primarily be me planning Kandria's immediate future, and I did try to do that. We now have a rough plan of what the rest of the year is going to look like for us. The next two weeks are going to be spent putting together a good trailer that should last us until the end of the year. It'll be a lot of work, but I think it'll be worth it, as I have an idea that I'm quite excited about.
As part of this trailer I'll also need to implement some visual polish to make for better gameplay recordings, and I'll also try to fix bugs in the meantime, too. Expect a patch to be released for the vertical slice in the next week or two.
The plan beyond the trailer is mostly geared towards one thing: the ProHelvetia Interactive Media Grant deadline that is set for the first of September. This gives us roughly four months to prepare a much more polished demo and put together better submission materials like the trailer.
Some sorely missing things should be part of this new demo:
a tutorial and introduction sequence to start off the game properly and introduce you to the mechanics
UI: main menu, save menu, map, load screen
a revised save system
extended platforming challenges with a better difficulty curve
quest system fixes to improve progress tracking
bugfixing every known problem
Testers have uncovered some particularly egregious bugs in the vertical slice that can break the quest sequence fully. I'm at the moment not sure why that can happen, but I'm very sorry if you've experienced that. This is one of the main reasons I want to push out a patch soon, so that people can in the very least complete the vertical slice.
Within the plan are also several months dedicated towards practising level design, exploring platforming mechanics, and refining combat. All of this pushes out the horizontal slice quite a bit from our originally estimated time. If everything goes more or less to plan we should be starting on that towards November of this year, with the completion sometime in February of next year.
After the horizontal slice we have about a year to fill in all the content and polish it. I'm already feeling a bit antsy about it and don't think it's enough time, but hopefully we'll get some good productivity boosts along the line so that we can still get it all done.
Anyway, that's it from me. I hope you'll check out Eternia when it comes out (wishlist to get a notification), and I should have some more exciting stuff for you to look at next week!
Tim - Factions and Eternia
This week I got back up to speed on Kandria after two weeks on Eternia, helping plan out my next work. Nick also wanted me to flesh out the other world factions ready for Fred to concept some ideas, so it's been cool taking our earlier notes on these and creating several diverse factions to inhabit the different regions of the world. This has really helped bolster the plot as well, by seeing how the different factions would tie into the planned five-act structure. We're also preparing a new trailer for the game, so I helped iterate on the script.
A quick word on Eternia: I really enjoyed the game jam we did, and I'm happy with the amount of content I produced in a short space of time. It required some quick thinking and rapid iteration to work within the game and time constraints - but I find constraints help you get creative, since they limit the choices you have. Family and friends playtests have gone well, and I'm looking forward to us putting another game out into the wild!
Fred - New capsule art
The initial capsule art for Steam Nick did back in November was alright, but he felt there was a lot to be improved on, so I set out to sketch some stuff. After a bit of research and some back and forth between us I finished a new version:
I'll be taking a stab at the header capsule next!
See you next week
for another monthly update!