Kandria
The Steam launch is over, now what?
It's been a week already since the Steam page for Kandria launched! The launch was really exciting, but also quite stressful for me. It was really fantastic to see all the positive responses and kind messages flock in, so thank you very much for that! Keeping up with all the venues like Discords, Twitter, Reddit, Forums, etc. did take quite a toll on me though, so I was happy to take Monday off. I've always known I'm not well cut out for marketing, but I guess this only cements it more that I'll have to hire someone more adept at it at some point! Whatever the case, thank you all again for your support, it was really nice!
Now that it's been a week I suppose I can also give some insight into the numbers of it all. When I checked on Monday morning, we had zero wishlists, which did make me freak out quite a bit. It turns out though that Steam only updates the numbers around mid-day UTC for some reason. You'd think with all the modern database tech they could deliver real-time data. Wonder why they don't! Anyhow, we managed to get 107 wishlists on Sunday, which is pretty good considering the minimal amount of marketing we'd been doing up until now. Since then the numbers have of course slowed down drastically, and we're now sitting at a comfortable 171.
Speaking financially, we'll need a lot more than that in order to break even on the project. I don't want this to devolve into a doompost though, so I'll just keep it positive and hope that we can continue to gather wishlists from here on out. Hopefully conferences and award shows are also going to be more of a thing again next year so that we can get Kandria onto those kinds of venues as well. Carving out a following without those would be impossibly difficult for us, I imagine!
We'll keep the Steam page updated with the monthly updates from here on out, and also adjust it with new blurbs and screenshots once we have more material. Now though, let's get on with your regularly scheduled weekly update!
Nick - Concept Work, UI
I've mostly kept myself busy writing lore, backstory, and worldbuilding stuff for the game. There's a lot left to be hashed out, and especially a lot that so far has just existed in my head, but not on paper for anyone else to read. I've started a lore document that'll be updated with information on the world and setting that we'll use as reference to keep things consistent and grounded.
I then wrote a bunch of sketch pages on the cultural aspects present in the region. This includes things like what they eat, how labour is divided, what differentiates the groups, what they talk about, what things they depend on, and so forth. It's currently only sketch pages and will be compiled into the lore document later once I've gone through things a bit more.
I've also started some concept work on the specifics of the location Kandria takes place in. Here's some very rough drafts:
Keep in mind that they'll almost definitely change a lot from what's seen here. I've so far mostly focused on the macroscopic aspects of geography and geology to try and frame the setting in a way that's grounded and believable. For the last map I was trying to work out how to place the various setpieces and how those would relate to the placement of the different factions.
We haven't yet decided on a specific number of factions, let alone what they stand for and how they behave, but it's very likely going to be constrained to 3, maybe 4 at best other than your own faction, in order to keep the production feasible. Still, even with just 3 there's a lot of interesting power dynamics that can be explored.
I'll probably ratify the culture notes into the lore document next week and go over it again together with Tim.
Other than that I've also done a slight bit of UI work for the game as I needed to take my mind off of things and do something altogether unrelated. It wasn't much work, but Kandria now has a functioning pause and options menu:
Aside from the essentials like video and audio settings, it also already includes some accessibility options like letting you scale the UI, changing the strength of screen-shake effects, and activating a god mode to make encounters easier. I've also started on a primitive localisation system, so that we're prepared for eventual translation work.
There's a bunch more options I'd like to add for accessibility in specific, like choosing from different fonts, changing button holds to toggles, and of course a way to completely customise the button layout both on keyboard and gamepad. Those options will have to wait a little bit longer, though.
Oh, and finally I also worked on a nice shockwave effect to accentuate explosions:
I have some other ideas for the effect, but so far I think it's already helping a lot to make the explosions look more interesting. We still need a particle system as well to add even more variety though. I have something for that, but haven't tested it yet...
Fred - Concept Work
Nice mix of tasks this week. Doing a bunch of short anims for FX and then just more creative stuff searching robot designs. Excited that next week might have the same kind of variety of tasks to do with the NPC designs coming up!
Tim - Concept Work
It’s been a 100% documentation week for me. Nick shared some cool new lore about the culture of the world, and I’ve had a couple of calls with him to really thrash out key parts of the backstory. This is in the process of being written up, and along with the map sketches he’s done, I feel like the sense of world and place is really coming together.
I’ve also pitched a couple of plot outlines for the entire narrative, taking into account our recent chats, and discussions we had very early on before we switched to doing the mentorship application and Steam page.
Schedule
I quite liked having a schedule update at the end of every weekly so far, so I think I'm going to keep doing that, at least for a bit. Currently the schedule is rather simple:
Ratify enough about the setting and lore to start building the camp and the initial quests needed for the vertical slice.
Iron out one or two bugs
Complete the character designs for Catherine and Jack
Go for a well deserved holiday break!
See you next week for the last weekly update of the year! If you haven't yet, wishlist us on Steam and hop on our Discord!