Kandria
Gamescom!
This week was mostly occupied by Gamescom and all the stuff surrounding it like Devcom and the Indie Arena Booth.
The way things worked this year was quite confusing, and it took ages for us to even know how Gamescom would work at all. As far as I understand it, Gamescom itself was just two streams by two media partners. Those media partners then got a listing of games they could cover on those streams. Naturally though, since those partners were big pushers, they would look for whatever would generate the most clicks, which definitely wouldn't be unknown indie titles. So yeah, the main event was pretty irrelevant for us.
Devcom was more like GDC with talks, a pitch session, and a matchmaking platform. I didn't even have the time to look at the talks schedule for Devcom though, so I'm not sure if I missed out on anything interesting there. I did present at their pitch session, but have no idea who listened in or if they cared at all. Oh well!
The Indie Arena Booth was some kind of... game thingy you could play on their website? And there we had a booth hidden around somewhere. I have no idea if people bothered to play that, so I can't say if it impacted our outreach in any way.
Finally, there was the MeetToMatch edition for Gamescom, which we used to arrange meetings with a bunch of publishers. I've pitched to a few now and most of them were quite favourable towards the game. That doesn't really mean much though, I'm sure these scouts see hundreds of games that they'd like to publish. We'll know more once they get their hands on the new demo and can evaluate it internally.
Anyway, these meetings took up a big chunk of my time, so I only had time for little things in between.
Steam Listing
Probably the best part about Gamescom for us was the Steam listing. Both Kandria and Eternia were listed there, and we got a sizable spike in Wishlist activity for Kandria:
I hope we can participate in a bunch more festivals like that and get similar spikes in the future. We really need to grow the community a bunch before release. We're also gonna focus some more on marketing in general once the new demo is out. Here's to hoping it'll pan out!
Load Screen
I also finally got around to implementing a load screen. It wasn't super important, since the game loads very quickly on modern systems, but now there's a screen, just to make sure the game doesn't appear to be stuck.
Funnily I've had to slightly slow things down so the screen doesn't just appear to glitch as the loading pops in and out.
Tim
This week I've researched into subreddits we could post on, to announce the new demo and keep people in the loop with our progress. I've drafted a couple of example messages for Nick to review, each of which take a different angle for an interesting (and non-advertising) reddit story. Two are essentially "I made a fan game", which could work in the Celeste and NieR communities; the other two are more technical dev angles, targeted at indie dev and Lisp communities.
Alongside a couple of sidequest bug fixes, I've also started planning out the quest content for the horizontal slice - essentially a rough draft of the main questline for the rest of the game. We already have a high-level plot outline as a guide, but now we're delving into the details. Naturally when you do this, you think of new ideas and see opportunities to draw out themes more than you did in the outline; I've shared this with the team for initial feedback, but already I think it's making the plot stronger.
It's also nice to be working on new narrative content after so long - for anyone following the blog, you'll know I've spent a long time playing and refining the first act quests for the demo; so it's great to break new story ground. It's like pushing back the fog of war to reveal some actual concrete narrative we can implement. I also think the things I've learned making the demo have helped speed up planning these new quests - hopefully when it comes to the implementation I'll be just as quick.
Other Things
Mikel has been revising the music tracks to make them fit better, Cai has been hard at work finishing all the remaining sound effects, and Fred has been working on sketching out the tileset for the next area already. Exciting stuff!
Next week is gonna be another monthly update, and most likely along with it a new demo version release! The monthly update will also be past the Pro Helvetia grant application, so we'll finally have that behind us as well. See you on the other side!