For Melbourne International Games Week this year I'll be doing a livestream of CONSCRIPT once again! Feel free to drop past and say hello or ask any questions you may have about the game.
Date and time: Wednesday 27th September 11:00am AEST Tuesday 26th September 6:00pm PDT
For Melbourne International Games Week this year I'll be doing a livestream of CONSCRIPT once again! Feel free to drop past and say hello or ask any questions you may have about the game.
Date and time: Wednesday 27th September 11:00am AEST Tuesday 26th September 6:00pm PDT
CONSCRIPT nominated in the GameMaker awards, VOTE NOW!
MORE GOOD NEWS SOLDIERS!
CONSCRIPT has been nominated for MOST ANTICIPATED GAME in the 2023 GameMaker awards!
Having come this far from zero gamedev experience before this project, winning this would really be surreal. If you have the time, it'd be really appreciated if you could vote for CONSCRIPT before August 30th.
I’m excited to announce that I’ve partnered with world renowned publisher Team17 to help bring CONSCRIPT to market in 2024! Team17 has published many incredibly successful indie classics such as Blasphemous, Overcooked and Dredge - and I’m proud to now have CONSCRIPT stand alongside this phenomenal catalogue. I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish as a team.
I know for some, “publisher” is a scary word, but I want to assure everybody that I maintain full creative control of the project. Team17 is assisting with the marketing and publishing side of things while I can focus all my attention on finishing CONSCRIPT.
It’s a relief to finally have a lot of gamedev roles now taken off my plate, so I can purely focus on getting this game finished and out there for everyone to play. Truthfully, it had become completely exhausting being a solo developer, marketer, bizdev, trailer maker and more - all by myself. Even just trying to secure funding throughout the years has been a damn near full time job at times. It’s hard to describe the amount of time and effort that is required to just keep afloat and maintain progress on a game of this scale all by yourself.
Stay alert for more exciting announcements going into 2024, and thank you all for your patience so far. I know it has been a long (and probably very frustrating) wait. Just know that I've not once over the past 6 years put my foot off the gas at all. Building a game of this quality and scale by yourself just naturally takes a lot of time.
Thanks for your support everyone!
CONSCRIPT April 2023 Devlog
April 2023 Devlog
Hey everyone, I hope you've had a fantastic 2023 so far.
It’s been a few months since the last update, but I’ve been hard at work, putting in many 10-12 hour days over the past few months. Recently I’ve been a little quiet across social media as I’ve felt my time is better spent at this point in development just finishing this project. It’s also a hard balance between showing off new stuff, and avoiding potential spoilers.
I spent a lot of my energy on marketing CONSCRIPT in both 2021 and 2022, through both digital and physical events like Gamescom & PAX. Trying to balance promotion and development as a one man team was very exhausting, but also a necessary part of the process. Most developers neglect this, only to then wonder why their game didn’t sell. I’ve done everything in my power to avoid this.
Due to these efforts, I recently passed 70,000 wishlists on Steam which is a tremendous milestone for me - and not something I had ever believed to be possible when I first started out. I didn’t even think I’d ever even reach 20,000 back in 2020. Thank you all for spreading the word throughout the years. It has been a big help. It gives me a lot of comfort knowing that the likelihood of me recouping my investment (and then some) is high. Let's aim for 100,000!
Even though I’m thrilled about this, the marketing efforts also undoubtedly came at the cost of actual development time which has led to a longer development timeline than I could have predicted. Traveling overseas, preparing convention booths, making trailers, compiling demo builds, planning social media posts, grant applications, negotiating with publishers - this all takes a tremendous amount of time over the span of a few years. Then there’s also all that extra business management stuff like legal work, accountancy, taxes, etc (fun!!). This is also my first ever game, so managing scope and timelines has not been easy, especially when you have literally zero industry experience as I did when I first started. Keep in mind, it’s only me behind the wheel here.
So for 2023 I want to remove these distractions and focus purely on development, which is what I've been doing the past few months.
I do want to apologize for how long things have taken. Just know that not once during these last few years have I slipped or lost focus, I just underestimated the time it’d take to fully realize the vision I had for the game.
All this being said, I’m happy to finally say that the game is very close to being content complete and finishable from start to finish. Now in game development terms, this doesn’t mean I can just hit the release button. There will be a lot of QA needed to ensure the game flows correctly and lives up to the experience expected of both a high quality premium indie game and also a cult classic survival horror game. Given the 6 year time investment for myself, I want to do this right, with minimal chance of failure. And when this game launches, I need it to make as big of a splash within the survival horror community as it possibly can.
With every passing season, I'm getting closer and closer...
In total, the game will be six chapters long, with most of the six chapters taking place in a completely new area. The 2022 demo contained chapter 1, which is the shortest chapter, and also around a third of chapter 2. So hopefully this gives you an idea of the scope of the game compared to the demo. I’m quite happy with the amount of environmental variety I was able to squeeze out of just one single WW1 battle.
My trip to Verdun last year has paid dividends, and the reference photos and research that I did has really taken the authenticity of CONSCRIPT to a level I wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.
Screen Australia Grant Funding
Earlier this year I was very lucky to be approved for another development grant from Australian screen agency Screen Australia! This will help ensure I can complete this final year of development with little to no financial stress.
I get asked a lot about my plans to potentially team up with a publisher to help release CONSCRIPT. For a while I was quite anti-publisher, not because I didn’t understand their worth but because I knew that nobody could do a better job marketing my game than me - and I somewhat have proved that given the amount of wishlists I was able to earn throughout the years by myself.
But the time has come to put my ego aside and focus on what I am best at, which is actually making CONSCRIPT. I don't want to be spending all this time organising marketing campaigns anymore!
So, I’m happy to say that I am currently in late stage negotiations with one of the leading publishers in the world to help me finally get this project out the door and release it to as large of an audience as possible. If I have been able to come this far by myself, I cannot wait to see what I’m capable of with a whole team. I can't say much more than that, but I look forward to talking more about this soon - so stay tuned.
That’s all for now, I just wanted to reassure everyone that things have been going great and I’ve had an insanely productive year so far. There’s still so much work to do, but for the first time I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Don’t fret if the social media updates are a bit sparse for the time being, it’s only because I’m deep in the trenches trying to wrap up the game.
I appreciate all your support and patience. Be safe and I'll update you all again in the coming months.
As always, you can follow me on Twitter for more frequent micro updates and new development screenshots. I typically try and post on Saturdays for #screenshotsaturday.
You can also join the CONSCRIPT Discord server. I'm fairly active on there and always happy to chat with the community.
Hey everyone! Hope you’ve all had a great 2022. For me, it has been one of the busiest but also most rewarding years of the entire development process!
I don’t have any big new announcements or anything here, but rather I just want to provide a quick recap of all the progress this year - across all parts of development! It has been an absolutely massive year behind the scenes. I’ve not put my foot off the pedal for the entire year. I'll also show off some new development screenshots throughout!
The first half of the year was spent on refinement and content. I took a lot of the feedback from the older 2021 demo seriously and improved on the core mechanics of CONSCRIPT substantially.
Combat was rebalanced, new mechanics were implemented, and there were a bunch of QOL improvements made across the board.
The 2nd half of the year was a tough balance between creating new later game content, and showcasing at various physical events. When you’re a solo dev, you have to wear so many different hats to release a successful game. Between actual development, securing funding opportunities, social media marketing and traveling for events - there’s always so much to be done. It’s very exhausting, but also highly rewarding.
VICSCREEN FUNDING
Very early in the year I was able to secure a development grant from Australian government agency VicScreen! This ensured that I was able to keep working on the game throughout the year in a full-time capacity which I have been very grateful for.
GAMESCOM 2022
In August I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Cologne, Germany to showcase CONSCRIPT and represent the Australian game development scene on the world stage.
I know it probably doesn’t sound like much for most, but when you’ve created something from absolutely nothing, with zero experience in gamedev prior - it’s surreal being able travel overseas to showcase your work.
It was an incredible experience, and I got to meet so many industry veterans and talented indie devs. Hopefully I’ll be back there next year!
VERDUN RESEARCH TRIP
After Gamescom wrapped up in Cologne, I made my way to Verdun, France to fully immerse myself in the place that I had spent years researching for CONSCRIPT. It was inspiring finally being able to walk through the landscape that inspired the game.
A century later, the apocalyptic wastelands have been overgrown with a dense and beautiful verdant forest. It was a strange feeling, walking through somewhere so tranquil yet having a weird feeling that something terrible happened here at one point in history.
Walking through the old overgrown battlefields, you can still make out trench lines and shell craters from more than one hundred years ago.
A lot of the forest was still gated off and inaccessible due to unexploded shells and explosives still buried under ground. It’s crazy that even a century later, the scars of war still mark the land.
Fort Vaux and Fort Douaumont were both really interesting visits, that I would highly recommend for any history nerds who ever find themselves visiting Verdun.
Even in the middle of summer, the air inside their tunnels felt so damp and cold. Now imagine being one of the soldiers forced to fight in there for weeks on end, while fending off grenade and flamethrower attacks.
Both of these sites were fairly tourist-y though, which I find always cheapens things to some degree. That’s why my personal highlight was exploring the ruins of Fort Souville which some of you may recognise as an area from the demo.
This fort has been completely left for nature to reclaim and most of the interiors have collapsed.
Fort Souville entrance in 1916:
Fort Souville entrance in CONSCRIPT:
Fort Souville entrance today:
Goes to show that eventually enough time will pass where the scars of war have completely healed and nobody will ever understand what has happened here. I feel like that’s why historical games are so important, because they allow us to travel back in history and get a very small feel for what things might have been like.
Fort Souville entrance in 1916:
Fort Souville entrance in CONSCRIPT:
Fort Souville entrance today:
I feel very lucky to have been able to come here, and a lot of pictures have already been used as reference material for the game. I hope that CONSCRIPT feels even more authentic now that I've explored Verdun myself.
In case you missed it, here's the new trailer I made back in September!
2022 DEMO UPDATE
In what has become somewhat of a yearly ritual, I updated the CONSCRIPT Steam demo later in the year to include the changes and refinements I had made since the last demo. This version has been the most positively received out of all revisions by far.
A lot of industry people would probably say that offering such a long slice of gameplay for free so early in development is a bad idea in terms of marketing and sales, but I think it has been a necessary part of the development and evolution of the game. If it weren’t for constant feedback that I have been able to gather from these demos, I don’t think the game would be as refined as it currently is.
However, as I move closer to release, I can’t guarantee that the same 1-2 hour demo will remain up during launch - as it would again be a significant gulf in quality and polish compared to the eventual full game. Enough time passes and you start to get a lot of messages and bug reports about issues that are no longer present in the full game which can be somewhat annoying. Demo builds also take a lot of time to develop, polish and publish, which may be time better spent focusing on a successful launch when the time comes.
So If you’d like to check out the CONSCRIPT demo as it is, I’d recommend doing it in the next few months. If I do decide to replace or take it down, I'll let you all know in advance.
PAX 2022
Following Gamescom, I showcased CONSCRIPT at PAX AUS in Melbourne! In PAX 2017 I visited PAX Australia as a consumer when I was only a few months into my game development journey. I saw the indie booths there and promised myself I'd one day be in that position. So I finally got to turn that dream into reality this year!
The CONSCRIPT booth was packed for all three days. Even with three people running the booth, there were no breaks at all. It was intense, but very rewarding.
People waited in line for up to 45 minutes to play the demo, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Moments like this make the years and years of hard work worth it. I hope to be back next year to meet more of you!
That same week I was also invited to speak at Freeplay Parallels 2022 infront of a packed crowd including industry veterans such as Shuhei Yoshida from Playstation! I spoke about my development journey, my inspirations and why I think it's important to explore history though the medium of video games. I'll let you know if the video ever becomes available online.
Even while balancing all of these events and commitments, I still managed to make a lot of progress on the game itself! I’m not ready to announce a release date yet, but just know I am getting closer to the finish line.
I know this game has been in the works for a few years now and some of you may be getting frustrated, but please understand that I’m a one man dev team and working as hard as humanly possible. I look forward to the day where you can all play the full game.
As always, you can follow me on Twitter for more frequent micro updates and new development screenshots. I typically post on Saturdays for #screenshotsaturday.
You can also join the CONSCRIPT Discord server. I'm fairly active on there and always happy to chat with the community.
I only post Steam updates for major announcements or news, and generally leave the smaller things for Twitter and Discord. So be sure to follow me on those channels if you're interested in more frequent posts.
That's it for now!
Have a great holiday period, and a happy new year - I'll see you all next year for what is hopefully the final stretch of development.
Stay safe!
DEMO Q&A LIVESTREAM WITH SOLO DEV! (MIGW)
At 5-6pm PDT September 29th (10am September 30th, AEST), I'll be hosting a livestream on the CONSCRIPT Steam page for Melbourne International Games Week.
Feel free to come on down and hangout! Happy to chat or answer any questions any of you have.
See you there, soldiers!
CONSCRIPT @ PAX AUS 2022
Quick announcement, soldiers!
I'll be at PAX AUSTRALIA in Melbourne on October 7th - 9th. I'll have a public booth with the new demo build playable, so come on by if you're planning on attending.
I've been meaning to do PAX Australia for a while but of course all physical events were cancelled over the past two years. So I'm excited to finally be there. I'll also have one of the fancier Indie Showcase booths.
I am at booth AIS8, here's a map for reference.
Play the new demo there, or just come have a chat with me! I don't mind.
See you there!
CONSCRIPT 2022 DEMO UPDATE (+New Trailer, New Devlog)
I have a lot of exciting news today, soldiers!
First...
NEW DEMO UPDATE
I have uploaded a new update to the CONSCRIPT demo!
It has been nearly a year since the last demo update, so I thought I'd upgrade it to more accurately reflect the gameplay of the final game.
New features in the 2022 (0.3.0) edition:
New intro cinematics
Updated character designs for enemies and protagonist
New NPCs and NPC behaviours
Inventory visual design upgrade
Updated menu designs and menu controls
16:10 resolutions
Combat rebalance
Improved combat setpieces
New animations for certain actions
Updated sound design and new music tracks
More save files
Object pushing mechanic
Mounted machine gun turret mechanic
New visual effects for fire, smoke, gas and explosions
Updated and more detailed map
Puzzle inspection screen is more intuitive (inspired by RE2R)
Enemy corpses persist
HD button prompts
Many smaller bug fixes and improvements
If you've already played the 2021 version, this won't offer any new areas - it's just a refinement of the same chunk of the game. Saves are not compatible with the previous demo either.
NEW GAMEPLAY TRAILER
Here's the new CONSCRIPT 2022 Trailer that premiered on Duel Screen's Another Indie Showcase & Realms Deep 2022.
Gamescom was a great experience, and travelling through the hills of Verdun for the first time gave me a lot of inspiration for the game.
I spent a week following the old trench lines and exploring overgrown abandoned forts. CONSCRIPT is going to become extra authentic now!
CONSCRIPT @ Gamescom 2022 + August Devlog
Gamescom 2022
Hey everyone!
Exciting news, I'll be taking CONSCRIPT to Gamescom 2022 to showcase a new build in the business area under the official Australia booth.
I've been working on this project largely by myself for around 5 years now, so it's surreal that I've made it to this point. Thank you all for the support so far.
Press, media or publishers - let me know if you wanna have a chat. (Hall 3.2, Stand C010 - D019).
New Screenshots
Here's some new screenshots from development. I also went back and cleaned up the design of most menus in the game. I want to fully embrace the WW1 theme and stay away from the minimalist design that most games these days have.
Check out the screenshots below, mild spoiler warnings apply.
