The campaign ends in 48 hours, so this is the last chance to back it!
Genre: Platform, Role-playing (RPG), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, IndieKandria
Only 48 hours left in Kandria's Kickstarter!
The campaign ends in 48 hours, so this is the last chance to back it!
Fix for Surround Sound
Demo Fixes (Windows Audio, and more)
We've also received reports of low framerates. We're currently still investigating what could cause this. A possible workaround for now is to try either playing in windowed mode, or toggling fullscreen off and on again.
The Kickstarter is now Live!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shinmera/kandria
Please consider supporting us, your contribution would help us out a ton. Oh, and there's some exclusive early bird reward tiers that won't be available for long!
Next Fest Day One Live Stream
The event goes live 22:00 CEST / 13:00 PT
Next Fest Day Two Live Stream
The event goes live 20:00 CEST / 11:00 PT
Steam Next Fest and Kickstarter Next Week! - June Kandria Update
Okey, June is the month! The Steam Next Fest and the Kickstarter are both happening this month. Be sure you won't miss them!
Steam Next Fest
One week from now the Steam Next Fest is going to be live, and with it the new demo for Kandria! We've been working on this for quite a while now, and we're excited for people to try it out in the fest. Make sure to put it onto your wishlist:
Kickstarter
One day after the Next Fest is another important date, namely the launch of our Kickstarter. We've been preparing for this for a long time now, and we're almost ready. Just a few more small things to iron out, and we're trying our best to ramp up the pre-campaign marketing to get as many people as possible onto that waitlist.
The first two days of a Kickstarter are super important for its success, so we need to make sure to make as big of a splash with it as possible, and ideally reach the funding goal by then already. If you'd like to help that become a reality, the best thing to do is to, of course, sign up yourself! But also tell friends and other people you know about it.
Thanks again, and I'm looking forward to the launch! We have a few exciting announcements to make during the campaign as well, and combined with the next fest, it's going to be a heck of a time, I'm sure.
Development Progress
May was a month fraught with some issues! First I fell ill for pretty much an entire week, and then I had to spend another week on the Digital Dragons conference in Krakow. Finally I had to take a week off just to try and recover from everything that's been building up from the two looming big events.
So as you might guess, not too much has happened this month. However, we're still making good progress. Tim has been hard at work rounding up all the main quest content and polishing it up to a good state. The game should now be fully playable from start to finish!
We'll start full-game testing soon to make sure the flow and everything works well, and also get to fleshing things out with some more side quests and extras. There's a ton of detail work that needs doing still, and that's going to make a huge difference. But it's also going to take a lot of time. Fortunately, we still have quite a bit of time left over until our next deadline looms, so we're still clear of the frying pan for now.
The Bottom Line
Okey, finally let's look at the roadmap from may.
- Create a new trailer and Kickstarter video
- General improvements to UI and flow
- Marketiiiing
- Buuuuuugs
- Add detail to region 2 and 3
- Do lots of user testing on the full game content
- Add more side quests and areas
- Implement Steam achievements
Yeah, as mentioned, not too much of a change here. But, not to worry, we're progressing according to schedule still.
Please wishlist Kandria and join our Kickstarter waiting list, and I hope to see you during the campaigns!
Polish of the game and polish conference - May Kandria Update
Kickstarter
Well heck. Next month is going to be the launch of the Kickstarter already! We're still working on the new trailer for that, and polishing things for the new demo, but things are looking pretty good. Most of the Things Left To Do now are in the marketing and outreach department.
I've started contacting other teams to see about cross-promotions and such. If you know anyone that has, had, or will have a Kickstarter for a somewhat similar game to Kandria, please ask them to contact me so we can see about arranging that!
In the meantime, if you haven't yet, subscribe to the Kickstarter and tell anyone you know that might be interested in it!
It may not seem like much, but it really does help us tremendously to have more people on that pre-launch signup.
Digital Dragons in Kraków
Kandria was selected to be part of the Indie Showcase, so I'll be at the Digital Dragons conference in Kraków, May 16/17. If you're coming to the conference, please stop on by, I'd love to have a chat!
Due to plane and other related reasons, I'll actually be in Kraków until the 20th. Probably just going to spend the time working in the hotel, but if you're nearby and would like to go grab a drink at some point, let me know!
Development
Another month of mostly bugfixes and small, incremental improvements to the tiling of the lower regions of the game. Some more playtesting as well, and further improvements to the later acts of the game's story.
We've also started on the boss fight AI, now that Fred has completed a first round of the animations for it. It's looking really nice!
This has also prompted some more adjustments to the overall combat behaviour. It's feeling a lot better now, but I'm still not quite happy with it. I'll have to make more improvements to the overall movement and animation timing of the player this month.
Another important improvement has been to the deployment of the game; the data files are now bundled in an archive, reducing both install size, and massively reducing initial load times.
All of the improvements we've been working on will be in the new demo that'll be available in the Steam Next Fest launching on June 13th. I hope you can wait until then!
In between this laborious incremental fixing and improving, I've also been writing some more in-depth looks at the kinds of things that make game development take so much time on our mailing list. If you're interested in reading about that, sign up here!
The Bottom Line
Okey, let's look at the roadmap from april.
- Implement new enemy types
- Finish designing the remaining main story NPCs
- Complete the Kickstarter page
- Create a new trailer and Kickstarter video
- Add detail to region 2 and 3
- Do lots of user testing on the full game content
- Add more side quests and areas
- Implement Steam achievements
In the meantime, we still could really use your help with spreading the word about Kandria's Kickstarter! If you know any friends or other communities, tell them about the Kickstarter!
Feeding Backers - April Kandria Update
Kickstarter
We now have a definitive date for the Kickstarter and the new demo: June 13th! The Kickstarter will launch on the same day as the Steam Next Fest, which will offer the new demo to play.
The new demo will feature new quests, areas, challenges, characters, music, and secrets to uncover! Make sure to subscribe to the Kickstarter to get notified when it goes live!
Steam Demo Feedback
The Steam demo is now no longer available, but quite a few people checked it out and sent us feedback about their experience. Thank you very much! A lot of that feedback, such as allowing you to bind multiple buttons to the same action, has now been addressed
We've also taken some of the broader feedback into account. A few told us that they'd gotten lost, so we added a little marker that points you in the direction of the next objective when a new task starts.
The marker is only on screen for a brief while, to avoid it being annoying. The map has also been improved a lot to help you out along the way. Aside from the movement trail that was already in, you can now also place pins on the map, and it'll show the associated quest when you hover over a target hint.
Development
We've added support for mixed font text display, which paves the road for localisation to languages such as Japanese.
Thanks to some local playtesting for the new demo, we've also implemented a bunch of small improvements to the dialogue, platforming, and UI. The next demo's already looking pretty good, and we should be done with it well in time for the Kickstarter.
Finally, we've begun detailing things out in the lower two regions. It'll be a while before testing for that can properly begin, but we're well on schedule for everything so far!
The Bottom Line
Okey, let's look at the roadmap from march.
- Incorporate a battle music track
- Implement better map navigation
- Prepare the Kickstarter data
- Complete the new demo
- Fix various UI problems
- Improve usability features
- Implement new enemy types
- Create a new trailer and Kickstarter video
- Finish designing the remaining main story NPCs
- Add detail to region 2 and 3
- Do lots of user testing on the full game content
- Add more side quests and areas
- Implement Steam achievements
Not a ton has moved here, since a lot of time was spent on polishing things up from the feedback we got from the demo, and completing very minor things all over the place. Generally as we near the end of the production, the roadmap is going to move more slowly, as most of the time will be spent on many very small items.
In the meantime, we could really use your help with spreading the word about Kandria's Kickstarter! If you know any friends or communities, tell them about the Kickstarter!
Steamed Demos, a Gamedev Expression - March Kandria Update
Steam Demo
A free demo of the game is now available for download on Steam! If you haven't tried the game out before, now's the next best time to do so. If you have tried it before, now is still the best time to try it out again, as the Steam demo includes a bunch of updates, changes, and fixes.
The demo will stay live until the end of the month. After that you'll have to wait for the...
Kickstarter
The Kickstarter preview page is now live. Please hit that "notify me" button on the page! It would help us a lot to gauge overall interest in the campaign ahead of time.
The actual campaign will go live in June. There's still a lot for us to prepare and do until then, and I'll make sure to keep you up to date on what's happening with it. For now, the most important parts are to get the trailer and new demo done that'll launch together with the Kickstarter itself.
Other Progress
We've already got a bunch of actionable feedback from the Steam demo, most of which has also already been fixed. Aside from that, though, we've been working on fleshing out the remaining game regions with new tiles, decorations, and so forth, polishing the lighting, animations, music, and sounds.
There's been a complete rewrite of the collision system. The old system had a number of really nasty glitches that I had already spent many hours on trying to fix. I finally gave up on that, and instead rewrote it all to use a different approach, which I hoped to be much more robust towards clipping and other precision issues. Turns out... it did! The new system works a lot better, and it only took me a day to implement the bulk of it. That was a really nice surprise for once!
We've also submitted Kandria for Pro Helvetia's production grant again. This is the last time we can do so, and I once again really hope we'll get it. It'll help a lot to offset much of my own investment and generally bolster our abilities to do marketing and so forth, which should dramatically improve our chances at making the game a success. The grant application once again required doing a bunch documentation and such, which eats some time as well. We won't know the results for quite a bit, at least not until June.
Finally we also have some good news regarding the Digital Dragons Accelerator. All of the contract work for that is now finally complete and I sent out that big stack (it was about 2cm thick) to Poland last friday. This means that we should soon enter the proper acceleration phase and get some funding! Hooray!
The bottom line
Okey, let's look at the roadmap february.
- Complete the horizontal slice
- Polish up the lower part of region 1
- Prepare the Kickstarter data
- Implement missing sounds for new mechanics
- Implement new enemy types
- Complete the new demo
- Create a new trailer and Kickstarter video
This should be all we need until June, so we have three more months to complete these tasks. Looks very doable. However, while that's going on, we have a few more tasks that need to move ahead as well:
- Finish designing the remaining main story NPCs
- Add detail to region 2 and 3
- Do lots of user testing on the full game content
- Add more side quests and areas
- Implement Steam achievements
And plenty more that'll need doing to bring the game's polish up to snuff. So much to do! Well, I better get back to work. In the meantime, make sure to check out the Steam demo!