Dog Sled Saga

Lisa and I have been working on Dog Sled Saga since December 8th, 2012, and I thought it'd be good to put it up for some feedback from other devs. I've done a lot of lurking and a few false starts on these forums, but now that I have a game coming along, I'm apt to jump back in.

We're up on Kickstarter! We're pretty proud of the video we made for it.

We are a duo: I am doing programming, game design, sound, and music, and Lisa is doing the visuals.

Racing

Dog Sled Saga is about racing a team of variable size, whose speed is determined by their hunger, which you suppress by lobbing a limited supply of treats to them. The rate at which they get hungry is randomized. We're trying to make it hard to spam food at a set interval--the dogs give signals that they're getting hungry before their speed actually dips.

A number of environmental hazards make this difficult. Current set:

Trees will deflect your throws
Wind will make your aimer less predictable
Boulders need to be jumped over--failure results in a hit to speed
The distance between restock points is the core challenge

In the long run, the parameters of each race will be randomized, but for now we have a preset race list (object placement within a race is randomized.)

Team

The other half of the game is managing your team, which is where I hope is the area where we can make the game feel really rich:

Races win you money to pay monthly dues for non-beginner leagues, hire new dogs, possibly buy some consumable items, gear, etc.
Your dogs will have a skill arc that improves with good races, and will deteriorate if they are left idle or let to get too hungry during races. If their condition gets too poor, a scenario may arise where it's better to take them off the team.

This part of the game is still in the planning stages--we're focusing on making the races fun and good looking first.

Design thoughts

It's easy for me to want to compare it to Pokemon, but I have a lot of XCOM:EU in mind, regarding attachment to your team members and their individual emergent stories. In the future, there will be more varieties of dogs to give them more of an identity (probably just harness color at first.)

I'm also striving to make as many of the game's systems be indicated by the dogs' behavior, rather than UI, as often as possible. I'm hoping that will make it feel more like having a real pet whose signs you need to learn to read.

A recent revision of one of said signals

Right now, there's some scenery, but the world is pretty sparse. We're taking the setting (in-race and overworld) pretty seriously in our plans. We also want to pepper the game with little context-aware cinematic screens that will last five or so seconds.

We won't be holding any gameplay ransom behind microtransactions.

Things we've posted

Lisa and I have a devlog on our site, and we're trying to keep filling it out.

I also have a

, but it's pretty dated by now compared to the game's current state. I also posted some drafts of the game's music.

Progress

I'm really happy with the way the game is coming along. We recently sent out a build to a handful of testers and learned a lot about making the races fun, and we're hoping to send out a new one in a week or two. I don't think the game is overambitious, but I hear every beginner says that.

In terms of release, we had hoped to get a preset-race-only version out early this year, but now we're thinking we'll power through and go straight for "Saga Mode" (managing your team and all that.)

I have a hard time estimating how long it will take to get it done. It feels like it's gonna take a lot of time, but it's within our reach, and we're hooked on working on it.

Platforms

The game is an Air app built with the Starling Framework. It's up and running on PC, Mac, and Android--iOS to come once I buy an dev licence.
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I hope this isn't too much of a messy brain dump--I hope to keep it up to date and hear what you guys think!