So, I took 2 weeks off the day job to both unwind a bit and to get some Act 2 stuff done. Glad to say I rate 10/10 on both those things! Most of the work has gone towards putting the completed artwork in-engine. I am dying to show you guys what it all looks like, but with such a short game I feel like every reveal is a spoiler to some extent.
So instead, here's one big scene, again outside and in the rain:
And here are a few of the others, but super tiny because I'm a tease like that:
The individual bits and bobs of act 2 are almost done (except the character art, but we're kinda waiting till the near end before diving into that too deeply), and the only real challenge that remain is the save system.
I have touched on this before, but to summarise: Act 1 used a simple chapters-as-checkpoints save system, which worked fine because it was entirely linear. Act 2 is not as linear, so this will not work. The trick though is not making a working save system, since that's the easy part - the trick is to make a dynamic save system that LOOKS like it's a simple linear chapters-as-checkpoints save system so that the user experience does not appear to change.
This will get even more tricky in Act 3, because Act 3 contains some procedural content. Oy. Later, later.
My main workstation also suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure last weekend. TME is unharmed though since that is backed up in two places in addition to the source control. Did manage to partially recover the contents of the drive too and didn't lose anything I couldn't tolerate losing. And in the process also got quite cozy with Linux' dumpe2fs and e2fsck commands.
Finally, the act 2 soundtrack is almost ready to roll out. It'll drop before Act 2. Woop!
Progress update - Act 2!
This is the day one would expect some joke-announcement like "all further development cancelled" or "it's now about pink ponies". But that'd just be mean, and we best leave that to other people.
Still plodding away at Act 2. It's going slowly, but we're getting there and I have booked some crunch-time off the ol' day-job in April to get it done. Most of the asset creation has been completed and the rest is coming together nicely. The music too is sounding dang smooth. In fact, my greatest worry about Act 2 is that it's all just so much better than Act 1 and people will feel it's out of place. I like how it has evolved though and would love to go back and do a bit of reduxing of Act 1 eventually.
Another day, another alley. Below is a quick work-in-progress shot showing what the artwork looks like vs. what it looks like in-game with the weather added. This particular scene is also camera mapped to geometry so that the perspective is real. In motion the effect is quite subtle so as to not stick out too much from the plain 2d stuff, but it allows for proper reflective surfaces and casting light on surfaces in a semi-realistic manner.
New year, new deals, new challenges, new music!
Just a quick update:
Sale
The Maker's Eden is going at a 75% discount on Steam for another 22-ish hours at the time of writing this. Good opportunity to grab it on the cheap! You can also get it in the Groupees "Does time really exist?" bundle for another week - some great music included in that one.
The original plan was to get all 3 acts done before localising. But more and more people have been asking for German, Spanish, Russian etc. We're trying to figure out at the moment how we could get this done at good enough quality with our mighty budget of $0. We stumbled upon a Russian fan-translation and have offered some assistance to them. We'll include that one in the main game, but it'll be clearly marked as a fan-translation. For all the others - working on it!
Twenty-fourteen!
Yup, it's that time, reflect on the year and all that fun stuff. So with that, the milestones!
Act 1 Released
Ah yeah, this was the best and craziest thing. There I was, making some last minute changes to the Steam Store settings, two days prior to launch, plenty of time for some more testing, when I accidentally hit the Publish button. Immediately it went into the Steam featured new releases list and I wasn't even sure the Steam repo actually worked on all platforms yet! Eep! It was bumpy, but hey - we learned, and thankfully it was all more or less good, bar a few fixes to the soundtrack DLC.
Bundles
Being a bit of a niche product, we turned to bundles for additional income and exposure. We've pretty much been in every darned bundle ever, with three more to follow. Generally I would not recommend bundles for most developers. If you can manage without them, it's probably best to wait until your game hits the infamous "long tail".
Act 2 and Vignettes
Two vignettes out thus far, another following soon. Development of Act 2 has gone at the pace of an elderly snail, since I'm still working the ol' day job, but it's progressing. There are a few key differences between Act 1 and Act 2. The most obvious is the structure. There's a bit more freedom of movement in that locations will unlock based on what you know, and you will need to travel to these locations to progress the story. However, this means the checkpoint save system is useless, so a simple autosave is used. I'll rethink Act 1's "chapters" once it's all done. Most of the remaining mysteries are revealed in Act 2, and I am reeeeally looking forward to showing what's in store for you in Act 3!
Second Artist
Say hello to Iain! In order to lift some of the weight of the artwork off Josh, we're splitting art work into background art (Josh) and character art (Iain). This presents a tiny problem though. We're not using a standardised art style like anime, so there's a certain amount of art shift that can be expected. With this in mind, some of the characters in Act 1 will have to be redrawn. Some folks might be opposed to this, but ya know what - it's going to look great and allows us to put more emotional variety in the character art! Will try and show off some hopefully not too spoilerish stuff soon. In the mean time, here are some concepts as a tease.
Finally
We have some music to share with you too, but will post that a bit later - stay tuned!
Second vignette released!
You can't reason with the cold heart of the law - or can you? We're proud to announce our second vignette, "Suspect".
To recap: Vignettes are short mini-episodes intended to fill in the gaps between the release of the remaining acts. Their purpose is to flesh out the world outside of the protagonist's story a bit, and to add a bit of flavour.
In this release we also updated the version of Unity3D to a more recent one. This introduced a few bugs that we hopefully fixed. As always, if you find anything, let us know!
First vignette released!
Greetings, denizens of the realms of Steam and outlying lands!
You'll have noticed that we've had a few updates to the game since we launched - bug fixes (thanks to everyone who submitted bug reports), and we introduced Steam Trading Cards shortly after launch - I hope you've been enjoying the pretty artwork and fun emoticons from completing the badges!
With this update, we're excited to announce the release of the first game vignette - a small snippet of extra content that will download to your game for the fantastic sum of Free, which you can then access from the game's main menu under Vignettes. In this first installment, you'll get to play Ella as she has a conversation with Gartley.
Enjoy, and as always, let us know if you encounter any bugs and we'll get the bug spray out. :)
Demo now available
We just made the demo available on Steam. It lets you play through the first few scenes of the story, and should give a good overview of the game's style, flow and pacing.
You also get to experience the beauty that is the soundtrack.
We're having a little technical difficulty - something derped while managing the soundtrack edition and it has become available just a teensy bit ahead of schedule for tomorrow's release.
We've decided to roll with it and have released the standalone version of the game, so here it is - a day early!
