Wormventures: Barrier 51
Sadly, the release date has to be postponed
The last few weeks (since the end of January) have been marked by bad news in my private life and even several bereavements in the family, which has thrown me off track. 2024 has been a dark year so far and the stream of bad news doesn't seem to stop.
Most things have been sorted out so far and I feel able to go back to work. I am confident of releasing the game in the 2nd quarter of the year even though I decided to enter a date in the third quarter in consultation with the Steam support team. I apologize and hope for your understanding.
What is the current status?
- The final translations into English have to be done (I saved the "best" for last), then a beta version can actually be put together for English-speaking testers.
- The German dubbing is not yet complete. A few smaller roles still need to be casted and recorded.
- After that there should only be some bug fixes, maybe I'll swap out one or two pieces of music again or add additional sound effects, just little things.
Steam Next Fest Livestreams in German and English available on YouTube
German (with voice overs and subtitles):
English (with subtitles):
Demo Update Version 1.0.1
- Added missing English translations
- Fixed some English translations
- Fixed missing version number in the main menu when switched to English
- Fixed Bob Wormley falling off his cushion
- Fixed moving and popping subtitles while the camera moves
Watch me play the German demo version of my classic 3d point and click adventure
Playing my own game live on Steam
Will I remember what to do even though I grew old while developing it for the last eight years? Stay tuned...
Demo version of the game released
Wormventures - Barrier 51 will not be published on MacOS
After some time of testing on MacOS, I decided with a heavy heart to no longer release the game for this system. There are too many different problems that have arisen there. For one player the installation via Steam doesn't work, for another it works but it won't start. For someone else, both installation and startup work, but there are countless graphical errors that make it impossible to play.
Since I don't have an Apple system myself, it's difficult for me to isolate the errors myself and I have to rely on other people. These are not good conditions for being able to offer support for an application or game. My motto is: Better not to offer the game on a system at all than to disappoint the players and not even be able to help them when they encounter technical problems.
In my childish naivety, I assumed that if the Unity Engine offered the ability to create a build for MacOS, there would be no problems with this, but I was proven wrong.
Maybe in the future I will find a way to make the game playable on MacOS and also be able to offer decent support. In this case, I would of course publish a MacOS port, but under the current circumstances, publishing it would be irresponsible.
Steam page now available in french, spanish and portuguese
But at least I managed to get the Steam Store page localized into french, spanish and portuguese, which I am very happy about.
Of course I am not able to evaluate the quality of those translations. So if you are a native french, spanish or portuguese speaker feel free to stop by at the Steam page of the game and maybe give me a hint if something seems to be off translation-wise. Thank you!
First complete playthough and playtime
First playthrough
I just reached another milestone in the development of the game. I finished the first real playthough of the the game. For every chapter I collected things that have to be polished and bugs as well. I even implemented some quality of life improvements like the language selection and load / save screens. For example it is possible now to name your savegame instead of only having a time and date as the savegame name.
The game features seven chapters and five of them are already polished and called final by me. Chapter 6 still has some bugs and things to improve. Chapter 7 only needs a little bit of polishing (tweaking some camera angles and directions of where characters look at).
Playtime
While doing the first playthough I recorded the playtime of each chapter to be able to give some values when asked. I recorded the times under the following conditions / constraints:
- Played using an optimized walkthrough (perfect order of doing things)
- Not really solving any puzzles, but always using the right answers / codes / ingredients initially
- No optional actions (not looked at a single hotspot in any scene, not picked a single optional dialogue option)
- Always using the shortest walk paths and the perfect scene order while running all the time
- Not skipping any mandatory cutscenes or dialogues
That means that this playtime is the shortest time you need to play the game, but not a speedrun time, because that would involve skipping all cutscenes and dialogues and using any glitches that could be found.
The times I wrote down are the following:
[table]
[tr]
[th]Chapter[/th]
[th]Playtime[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]0.5[/td]
[td]15 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]1[/td]
[td]35 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]2[/td]
[td]2 : 15 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]3[/td]
[td]1 : 00 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]4[/td]
[td]59 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]5[/td]
[td]36 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]6[/td]
[td]35 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]7[/td]
[td]15 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Sum[/td]
[td]6 : 30 : 00[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]
"Looky - The Adventure", the freeware 2D predecessor that was released 2007 featured the chapters 0.5 to 2 and the playtimes that I got from players back then were around 5 to 7 hours. Since some things were added to those chapters gameplay-wise it should be even more now.
Doing the math that the perfect playtime is at 3 hours and the average time was around 5 to 7 hours I would take my recorded time times two which should result in an average playtime of
12 - 14 hours
for a player that never played the game before and has to puzzle his way through.
I still have some elements and puzzles for the last chapter that I discarded lately (one puzzle and a shooting minigame). Maybe I put them back in, but that would only add some additional minutes to the gameplay, but the last chapter has a bit to less interaction right now for my taste. Currently it's very cutscene heavy.
All in all I would call this game a long one while still being very varied. Not only because of the visual changes while travelling to different continents of planet Vermis, but also puzzle-wise. While for example chapter 2 is very inventory heavy with lots of combination puzzles, chapter 5 is more on the deductive side with you only carrying 2 inventory items the whole chapter.
Next steps
As I said above chapters 6 and 7 need a bit more polishing before I would call them final. After that I'll export all dialogue lines and other texts from the game to have them proof-read. Then the voice actors can start recording their parts while I will work on the English translation of the game and pick music for all scenes for chapters 3 to 7, as most of the scenes still don't have music or only some placeholder music tracks.
That said I don't think I will be finished until end of the year which means I have to move the release date once again. As I have a quite clear picture of what still has to be done and based on my experiences I would expect a release of the full game in Q1 2024. Maybe I will be able to hit the next Steam Next Fest in February for the release, which would be great.
New Trailer released
I just released a new Trailer for the game in English and German.
I lately thought about what all the great classic adventure games that I grew up with had in common. What is the essence of a classic point and click adventure? What was it those games taught us adolescents that made us nice, respectful and responsible grown ups?
Basically three things came to my mind: Vandalism, theft and fraud.
Of course "Wormventures - Barrier 51" is a pure classic in that regard and this is what the new Trailer is all about.
Have fun!
Marcus
English:
German: