Kandria
There's been a change in plans
This week was a rather stressful one as it had a big surprise in store that I was not prepared for at all.
Nick - Floundering
As you may remember, there's a funding agency in Switzerland called ProHelvetia, which has a section for interactive media, or games. I've applied for funding there on the last call, which was this March. The plan so far was always to apply for that grant again coming March.
This Tuesday they offered a free lecture on how to do pitching for publishers and so forth, as a sort of preparation for the mentorship programme that they also offer. In the QA section of the talk I asked about whether it would be possible to apply for both the grant and the mentorship programme, and – just to be sure – whether the grant would happen again in March. The answer was that, yes, you can apply to both, they're independent. And, as you might guess, the grant will happen again, but not in March. It's instead half a year later, which has some severe implications for me.
Initially March was ideal; it seemed like a perfect amount of time to get a vertical slice together, and given that we'd get the grant, it would have also been ideally timed to extend my funds so that I could continue to employ Fred and Tim without interruption. Now that it's moved by half a year, it'll be about a year or more from now until I would get the funding. My initial budget did not have enough allocated to do this.
So this all threw my plans into the wind. I think I can manage the budget for now by increasing my personal investment, but that'll strip me pretty thin. If we don't get the grant we'd have to either take up a loan or look for a publisher. Both not things I'd like to do, but it's an eventuality I'll have to prepare for now.
Anyway, to help bridge the gap that's now opened up, I've decided to also apply to the mentorship programme that they're offering. This would include coaching, matchmaking, promotion, and a small grant. The only problem is that the deadline for applications is 30th of November, which does not give us a lot of time to get everything ready in.
A new demo is not required for the application, but I think it would be a very good thing if it was, so we'll still try to get that out. Other than that though we now have to prepare a bunch of material for the application, most notably a press kit and a 3 minute pitch video. The press kit is done for now; Tim will talk about that. The pitch video still needs to be planned and done, as well as of course the demo.
In addition to the demo release I also wanted to get a public Steam page out, both to start gathering wishlists, but also to have a much more solid and convincing appearance. Steam requires a bunch of information about your game, as well as a bunch of specific art assets for the store page and library. I started working on those assets this week:
There's still two more assets I need to make, but I should get that done next week.
Aside from the assets I also did some market research, looking for similar games on Steam. It appears that the combination of platformer and hack & slash is rather rare! There's a total of 90 games tagged as both on Steam, and the overwhelming majority of those do not feature platforming in quite the way Kandria intends to do. This indicates that we might be landing in a market niche, which is good. It might also mean that people don't care much for that combination, which would be bad. I'm hoping for the former!
Finally I also did some bug fixing and started work on designing an animation system for my UI framework. The latter isn't done yet and I've shelved it for the time being until this application process is done.
If I don't have much to say for next week aside from showing some art assets I'd like to do a longer technical report again, perhaps this time on collision detection or platforming mechanics – will see!
Fred - Breaking androids
I completed a first pass of the aerial attacks and then started working on sketching out some designs for the first enemy type in the game:
For the rest of the month I'll have to focus on completing the animations for that, and tweaking the attacks to feel better. If we have the time I could also start to work on some extra effects like explosions.
Tim - Press kit
Having gotten a handle on the tools last week, and begun to consolidate some of the narrative documentation, I switched to copy for the presskit this week, to help prep for the Pro Helvetia application. This was actually quite beneficial, as being marketing copy, it forced me to think about the tone of voice we might want to adopt for the game. Listing out features as well made me realise that this game sounds even cooler than I thought before!
I also modified the example quest that Nick has added to the demo, again to get me using the tools, but also to create a tight mini-narrative that we could submit with the funding application. It’s sort of a microcosm of some of the ideas I have for the game’s wider plot. I’ve only just begun implementing it though, but working on and refining this will likely occupy my time for the next few weeks towards the deadline. I’m looking forward to exploring the character voices in dialogue, and again honing in on the game’s tone.
Updated Roadmap
Given our new surprise deadline, we have updated the roadmap for the next demo, scheduled for 30th of November:
Finish a first draft of the zombie civilian android enemy type
Make the combat at least passable
Add some more rooms
Rewrite the quest
Add some new effects and improve the stability of the game
Create a public Steam page
We'll keep you posted on how things progress.