Genre: Platform, Role-playing (RPG), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, IndieKandria
Kandria Steam Demo Coming 1st of March!
Kickstarting the Final Stretch - February Kandria Update
Kickstarter!
There will be a Kickstarter for Kandria in June! We're currently still preparing for it and working out all the details. We'll be sure to let you know once we have a "coming soon" page for it up and running.
The Kickstarter will come combined with a new demo on Steam Next Fest, as well as a brand new trailer. I hope you look forward to it, I know I sure am!
Horizontal Slice
The Horizontal slice is moving along according to schedule. All the areas for the main game are now playable, and all of the story content is almost complete. That still leaves a ton of work to finish the game though, don't get me wrong. We need to playtest it all to make sure the traversal feels right, that the pacing of the game works well, and that the progression is satisfying and fun to engage with. Then we need to polish up all the areas' visuals and make them really pop. That, especially, takes a lot of time on its own already.
We also need to add some side quests and deck out the areas with secrets and things to discover and investigate, to feed into that nice loop of one distraction leading to another that open world games tend to do well. And finally there'll be a long stretch of smoothing out corners, playtesting, fixing bugs, adding small bits, and localising the game.
To be honest, thinking about all the things we still have to do is making my head spin, but so far we've, miraculously, been able to stick very close to our planned schedules, so it seems like we're moving ahead at a good pace.
The bottom line
Okey, let's look at the roadmap from, uh, two months ago since I didn't include one in the yearly update.
- Implement RPG mechanics for levelling and upgrades
- Explore platforming items and mechanics
- Practise platforming level design
- Draft out region 2 main quest line levels and story
- Draft out region 3 main quest line levels and story
- Complete the horizontal slice
- Polish up the lower part of region 1
- Implement new enemy types
- Complete the new demo
- Create a new trailer and Kickstarter video
We've already started work on the new demo, which we need to have done at least a month before the Kickstarter launches in June. So much to do!
2021 for Kandria in Review
Vertical Slice
The first thing we did in the year was start up the actual production phase of Kandria, and I'd like to remind you at this point that we had only drafted up the overall locations and plot of the game, but not made any content for it. All we had at this point was the pre-production demo.
It took us a little over three months to complete the slice, which contained about an hour of content, multiple NPCs, multiple tilesets, complex pathing AI, and several quests.
We then took a retreat to create a very small game very quickly.
Eternia: Pet Whisperer
In just two weeks we built and released a visual novel game called Eternia: Pet Whisperer. You can find and get the game on Steam (currently half-off!)
The purpose of this exercise was both to give us a break from the rush of developing the vertical slice, and to give us the run-down on a full game production cycle including release on Steam and all that entailed.
It was quite an adventure, but I'm still pretty happy with the level of quality we managed to achieve in the final product!
Team Expansion
After Tim and Fred joined the team last year, we had another expansion happen this year, with Mikel joining us as the composer, and Cai as the sound designer. With their help the game really started to expand its atmosphere.
There's still a lot more to do to improve Kandria's soundscape, but we're already so much further from where we started off when I was trying to make my own effects and we only had a royalty free sample track for the music.
Anyway, with the two on board as well we are now at maximum capacity. Unfortunately with my meagre funds I can't afford to hire any other people, no matter how useful to the project they might be. Heck, I can't even afford to hire the current team members full-time. Making games is ridiculously expensive, and since we currently aren't making any money, this is how it's going to be.
A New Trailer
After Mikel joined the team we launched into a two week production on a new trailer, which required a lot of extra art, editing, custom music, and voice acting as well. I'm really glad we took those two weeks to do it though, as the trailer was invaluable for all the upcoming pitches I had to do to publishers.
[previewyoutube="nf9Z4MPBbfc;full"]
By now I've seen the trailer so many times that it wore off a bit and I'd like to make a new one soon. Probably once the horizontal slice is complete, eh?
Events
Thanks to the very generous support from the Swiss arts council Pro Helvetia, we were able to attend a number of events and conferences this year!
- Global Games Pitch
- Pocket Gamer Connects Digital
- Game Developer Conference
- Gamescom, Devcom, and Indie Arena Booth
- Game Industry Conference
- Nordic Games
This was tremendously helpful to get our name out there a little and start building a network of contacts, especially for publishers. Quite a few of them have showed interest in Kandria, and we're currently in deeper talks with one in particular. We'll keep you posted as soon as we can.
At the GIC we took part in the first ever Polish-Swiss game jam, which the team Tim and I were a part of ended up winning! It was really cool to get to know a couple of our fellow Swiss devs more closely, and I hope to meet them again sometime!
We also applied for the GDC 2022 call Pro Helvetia put out. If we get accepted to that, we will also be at GDC in person next time! How exciting!
Digital Dragons Accelerator
Thanks to our attendance at Gamescom, we were put into contact with the organisers of the Digital Dragons Accelerator, a new programme by the KPT Poland Prize team. This programme offers both mentoring and a significant grant for non-polish studios, under the requirement that you first establish a company in Poland.
Out of more than 90 applicants, 13 were selected to be a part of the programme, and we are part of it, which is super exciting. Things aren't for free entirely though, as setting up a company in Poland is quite an involved affair, and so I've had to spend a lot of time communicating with the accelerator team and a law firm in Poland to get that process going. We're now getting close to being done we have and fully own a company in Poland, but still need to handle some further affairs such as setting up a bank account, and filling in quite a bit of extra stuff for the acceleration contract itself.
However, this is all progressing, and we're excited to use the accelerator funds and support to further the marketing of Kandria in the coming year. We'll have more details on that to share soon, so please keep on the lookout!
Horizontal Slice
Over summer while we were busy with all the events and marketing and all sorts of other stuff we also kept polishing the vertical slice we had, added an interactive tutorial, started user testing it in full, and generally improved its overall flow, look, and feel a lot. We then started production on a horizontal slice.
The slice required writing out the main storyline of the game, implementing it in quests, designing the new tilesets for the other game regions, designing the looks of the new NPCs, implementing new platforming mechanics for gameplay variance, and ultimately implementing a tonne of new platforming challenge rooms to fill out the world.
We should be able to complete the slice in February, and then use that to create a new demo, which should be shorter, more focused, and give a quicker in on the action than the slow ramp-up of the actual game's start that we used for the vertical slice demo.
Looking on to 2022
As I'm writing this on the last day of 2021, another heck year on heck planet, I have quite a lot of things on my mind. One of the things that's bothering me in particular is the planned release schedule for Kandria. So far, the date has always been March of 2023, but I'm very strongly considering moving that to something still within 2022.
I've been avoiding trying to think of the project during the holidays, so I haven't formed a decision on that yet. As with all of the other things that are in flight right now though, I'll be sure to let you know as soon as I can if you subscribe to our mailing list.
I hope you had a good holiday season and make a great start into the new year. As always, I want to thank you for sticking around and following Kandria's development. It hasn't been an easy journey so far, and I'm often plagued with doubts about it all working out, so it means the world to hear people following its development, and excited about its eventual release. Thank you!
Vote for Kandria at the GDWC!
https://thegdwc.com/pages/game.php?game_guid=f9c7ff16-dd18-4624-8744-bd607f93eab7
Slicing the horizon - December Kandria Update
Horizontal Slice Development
We've been busy working on the horizontal slice content, hammering out quests, art, music, levels, and new mechanics. We now have an overview of the complete game map, and it clocks in at about 1.2 x 2.2 km, divided up into 265 unique rooms.
This is pretty big already, but not quite the full map size yet. Once we're done with the horizontal slice, we'll be branching things out with sidequests and new side areas that are going to make the map even more dense and broad.
The map is split up into four distinct areas, which we call the Surface and Regions 1-3. Each of those areas have their own unique tileset, music tracks, NPCs, and platforming mechanics.
The demo already shows off the Surface as well as the upper part of Region 1:
We can also give you a peek at the visuals for Region 2:
I'm really excited to see everything come together, but there's still a lot more levels for me to design before that. I'm glad that I finally managed to get up to speed doing that, but it's still surprisingly hard. Coming up with fresh ideas for each room and making sure the challenges are properly balanced is very time consuming.
As such, progress has been a bit slower than I would have liked, and that's been eating at me. Still, I think we can get the horizontal slice done without too much of a delay, and we still have a lot of development time scheduled in our budget, so I think we'll be fine.
Tim
I’ve been working on the horizontal slice, and act 2’s mainline quests are all but done to first draft quality, with a decent first pass on the dialogue. This contains several significant new quests, which send the player far and wide around the lower part of region 1, which Nick has greyboxed out. It’s been fun getting into the headspaces and voices of the new characters you’ll meet here, and spinning up again on the scripting language. There was some tricky functionality to script, since we want some of the quests to be encountered naturally by the player, even if they’re not at that part of the story yet; it needed some extra thought to make sure these hang together based on the different ways the player might approach it. This should be good learning going into act 3, another meaty act. Though things should get faster to implement for the following acts 4 and 5, since the plot there is getting railroaded towards the climax.
The bottom line
As always, let's look at the roadmap from last month.
- Fix reported crashes and bugs
- Explore platforming items and mechanics
- Practise platforming level design
- Draft out region 2 main quest line levels
- Revise some of the movement mechanics
- Animate more NPC characters and add an AI for them
- Implement RPG mechanics for levelling and upgrades (partially done)
- Draft out region 3 main quest line levels (partially done)
- Complete the horizontal slice
December is going to be a short month as we have two weeks of holidays ahead of us, which I'm personally really looking forward to. I will be writing a year wrap-up for the end of December though, just like last year.
As always, I sincerely hope you give the new demo a try if you haven't yet. Let us know what you think when you do or if you have already!