Some words to keep you guys in the loop...
Back in January of 2016 I believed that Jack B. Nimble was going to be finished in the first half of the year, allowing me to focus on another project I had just started. Unfortunately, neither of these things happened. As I’ve mentioned in the past, Jack B. Nimble is a passion project. I don’t expect much in the way of financial gain, but rather the experience of shipping a game (mostly) alone. I want to use Jack B. Nimble as a barometer for future independent games that I create.
Back in January I didn’t realise how much further I had to go, and it’s hard to even blame feature creep. It was more that there were so many base features required to distinguish the game from a simple post game jam release. If it wasn’t obvious from the reviews, it was from the feedback I received from fellow developers – the first release and two subsequent updates were bare-bones. Players had greater expectations than a polished game jam build. They wanted progression, variety, leaderboards, achievements – all standard within the mobile games, but mostly absent from Jack B. Nimble. Though I didn’t realise this at the time, this feature checklist slowly became the focus for the year.
I started slow. I began updating the front end by adding missing features and improving the flow in and out of the game. By the end of February, along with the improvements to the map and menus, I had visually raised the quality bar across the project. Just by filing down some of the rougher areas as I fleshed out the aforementioned feature checklist.
By April I felt that the core experience and game were complete, and I was ready to start building promotional material. However, I really didn’t account for the number of bugs and workload required to get achievements, stat tracking and the remaining leaderboards in game. It took months.
But here’s where things get exciting. Now that the bugs are squashed, the game is done… Jack B. Nimble is done!
Before I commit to a fixed release date, I need to work on a bunch of release material, hence why I’m not exactly screaming from the rooftops about it. I mean, finally, right? It really is a shame that I am building upon a released product; you only get one release, and one chance at reviews (if at all). So I feel like this huge update will pass a lot of people by – I’m not letting this get in my way though, because I still believe that the game could get a new lease of life on Steam. Though recent news of Steam Greenlight’s demise may have made that a little more difficult…
Originally posted on my Noonan.Design