HELLO? Hello hello hello...
ECHO! Echo echo echo...
It's been a long time since our last post here - almost exactly a year in fact! I've been wanting to return for a while now, and was considering making a new topic because things have changed/progressed so much, but no, this is a development log and I guess that's what it's all about. Showing the ups and downs, the ins and outs. So here we are. Let's call this a bumper edition (heh, forum puns).
First of all, let me bring you up to speed on our studio. My last post was about us getting Greenlit. Immediately after that, we applied for a government funding scheme here in Ireland called the Competitive Start Fund. It was an unpleasant couple of months where we had to take a significant amount of attention away from development, to focus on application forms, presentations, and other nasty business-related stuff. It all worked out in the end though - after a few tries we were awarded the grant, which meant that we got to continue development while also expanding the team a little bit.
Around the time of my last post, we had also just joined the ID@Xbox program (the first Irish company to do so!), but because it was early days and we didn't really know where that was going to go, we didn't say anything. Since then, Xbox have become a much bigger topic of discussion where The Little Acre is concerned. In December we signed the Title License Agreement, and during GDC we announced that The Little Acre would be coming to Xbox One, in addition to Steam. Xbox even uploaded our trailer from their own YouTube Channel:
Since then, they've been a great help where promo is concerned. They often retweet our stuff, make little blog posts which reference our weekly live-streams, and then at E3 they passed around a bunch of double-sided cards which had Little Acre artwork on one side, and the logo with a QR code linking to our website on the other.
They also posted our second trailer on their YouTube channel!
So, onto the game. It has changed, a LOT. The story, characters, and animation style remain the same, but the first thing we did after getting funded was review everything we had so far. We figured we could do better, so basically all the artwork that I've showed you guys in the previous posts is scrapped. You can probably see that from the trailers, but the blue-grass-purple-cliffs type of aesthetic for the alternate universe is gone, and now looks like this:
The real world is also a lot more detailed, and the characters are a bit more substantial:
We've also been working on making the animations smoother than they were previously.
In terms of gameplay, we've also pivoted slightly. I spoke before about how it's an adventure game supplemented with more action-oriented bits where the player might have needed to fight various creatures in between finding their way around Clonfira (which is the name of our fantasy universe). We decided to drop this feature for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's
hard to get a combat mechanic to feel good. Unless it's the core mechanic for your game, it might not be worth spending so much time on, as was the case with us.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it affected how we would have had to market the game, and who we would market it to. We'd be showing the game to old-school point-and-click adventure fans, and hoping they wouldn't be put off by the combat elements. And conversely, hoping that people who were looking for something like Bastion wouldn't be put off by the adventure game side of things. Ultimately, we decided to focus on the adventure. In my opinion, the game is still pretty unique among adventure games - we still transition from the traditional perspective to isometric when the player travels to a different universe, and once they've done so, we do make the game-play and puzzles a bit more exploratory than straight up adventure games usually would. We demoed the game at a convention here in Ireland called ArcadeCon, and I streamed this play-through of a section of the game which should show you what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsKW6Vp4SyoSo, as with most studios, a difficult start involving a LOT of hard work and four people sort of working part-time. Now, a team of nine, STILL a lot of hard work, but things are looking pretty good!
I'm all info'd out for the minute, but I'm sure there may be questions. I'm aiming to update this more regularly from now on, but if anyone has questions about anything at all, ask away!