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[Sazem]

Sure, here is the latest news.
Today Steam gave me permission to release! So I am going to push the self destr... release button on 8th of november 2019.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/926400/Scatteria/

Ive been only programming for the last... year or so. Not so much art or something cool to show. But, well I will just add this here.


I totally failed at marketing. I got like 700 wishlists, so lets see what happens :D
If this game dont tank and dissapear with other gazillion games released propably the same day its going to be a small wonder.

[Schrompf]

The Steam page is a bit lacking IMO. Is there any single player content or is it just multiplayer? And judging from the wishlist count: are there bots or are you solely relying on humans to provide gameplay?

I personally was hoping for a single player campaign with some cheesy story line.

[Sazem]

What areas I could improve in your opinion? I am all open for ideas. The communication is very important and if storefront is unclear let me know what I should change?

Current version doesnt have singleplayer mode still. Its only split screen or online multiplayer game.
this year Ive been redoing my code base to change it multiplayer aware which took a way more than I originally expected, also was way more harder.
I am going to start implenting the singleplayer mode most likely in Q1 2020. No idea how long it will took thou

[Schrompf]

Good to hear you already have singleplayer on your slides. Still I wonder if releasing it now might be too early. Mind you: you only have one shot on Steam. The day you release is the only day your game will be present to hundreds of millions of players. The very next day you're already down to a "natural" stream of visits, which is more in the hundreds then in the millions. So if you release, make sure that your first players will want to recommend your game. And that's going to be difficult if each of them buys it, starts it once and notices she can only run around deserted servers with nothing to shoot.

And for the Steam page: I missed a few lines about what the actual gameplay is. You have that, but it's shrouded IMO. A clear "multiplayer ONLY against other players, pure deathmatch, capture the flag, ..." would have helped. But maybe you intended it to be less obvious... after all I'd refrain from buying multiplayer-only games from indie devs when even large AAA releases sometimes struggle to get their servers populated. And populated servers are the only means of playing this game. So a clear "multiplayer only" message would probably keep me from buying it. Hm. Difficult.

[Sazem]

Yep, I totally agree with you this one. Though spot currently but I have to make the release now, going too thin already with the money. Would love to use couple of more months making it more polished with more features & make more markting.

I know its that one shot I got and even not doing at all marketing before is like I shot myself into feet already
The one good thing is that I am solo dev, so the income dont have to be really huge to me to continue. Lets see from the feedback which I am going to make as my first priority. Most likely it will be singleplayer.

There wasnt any means to be obscure with storefront. I have to make the points more clearer. I dont want the users the get wrong ideas and get bad reviews because of that.

[Sazem]

So I just pressed the release key! Lets see what happens. 
https://store.steampowered.com/app/926400/Scatteria__Postapocalyptic_shooter/

[Schrompf]

Good luck!

[Bombini]

Hi,

i would urgently activate singleplayer.
Even if its just a sandbox without enemies. Just a sandbox where you can explore, destroy some loot and collect some stuff. The current version realy under sells what you have in mind.

Cheers!

[Sazem]

Hi,

i would urgently activate singleplayer.
Even if its just a sandbox without enemies. Just a sandbox where you can explore, destroy some loot and collect some stuff. The current version realy under sells what you have in mind.

Cheers!

It is possible to already play splitscreen alone.
Select 1 player and then hit aim with controller or with keyboards.
I am currently working on a tutorial level and I will try my best to make one small singleplayer level with simple A.I That you can kill. Hopefully I got this update done this week and I will update it to Steam! Thanks for the patience!

The guy who review the game in youtube and couldnt play, I think there was a bug when he hit the start and nothing happened and then finally he moved on to try the online code. He was so close
That ui bug was fixed already in 0.21v.

[Schrompf]

Just found this devlog again, and checked the Steam page. Sad to see it went exactly as expected. You're not going to add a singleplayer campaign, are you?

[Sazem]

Just found this devlog again, and checked the Steam page. Sad to see it went exactly as expected. You're not going to add a singleplayer campaign, are you?

Oh boy absolutely!
The singleplayer is coming along... I had to say that I underestimated (again lol) how much time I need to make the A.I.

Not a lot of tutorials for 2d sidescroller A.I. Also my environment is dynamic, which increased the difficulty. And ofcourse I never made anything A.I related before.

Going to upload the singleplayer version to Steam asap. In the private testing there has only found some minor issues. Still got some input relative stuff to work on. Try to make some marketing etc etc.

Currently I have some bigger stuff to work on but I am estimating now that the singleplayer update will be at Steam 7 of june.

Ive been thinking to update about the pathfinding + A.I stuff here in the devlog but really forgot all of it. Should have logged more about it. I think I will write later on most of it here anyway.

Here is small teaser gif whats coming in next few weeks:


Fun fact: When this A.I started to work and I really played against it first time.. it felt awsome! Scatteria feels so much more real game now than before.

[Beastboy]

Nice to see you still work on this, for a moment i tought it was abandoned

[Sazem]

Thanks! Yeah I think I shouldnt have kept radio silence and communicate more.
Im sure many people thought/thinks the same but I am still working on this game daily.
Been working for it so long I will definitely going to complete it. If it doesnt sell, well thats bad but at least I want it to be good, so then I can be proud of it!

Currently I am fixing a lot of issues, most of them are bit mysterios.
Main Menu went broken (never even touched it).
Tilemaps went broken too, worked fine in editor but in build the player falls throu?
"Keyboard Only" input system seems to be broken.. The A.I kind of uses the player input systems to move, so I might have broken it... and the list goes on.

Funny bug happened today.  The splitscreen doesnt support still the A.I gameplay. I think I will add the co-op or similar in the 0.50 alpha update, but still its not implented. Today I started to test the splitscreen and the A.I Enemies started to spawn into the scene too (shouldnt be possible).. The best thing was that it worked supricingly well! So it shouldnt be big job finally to add.

Here is the one of the coolest levels I made so far for Scatteria.

The Oil Rig:


 

[Beastboy]

Wow, the industry enviroment looks very apealing, will it also have animations? Smoke and stuff ?

[Sazem]

I finally got the singleplayer mode in game! It has now 40% discount too for this week!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/926400/Scatteria__Postapocalyptic_shooter/

The A.I is not the smartest fun but its always surprices me how much fun is to play against!
Especially when the hoardes comes.
The Pathfinding needs some improvements, has some problems with bridges etc but most of the time its work pretty ok.

Here is some of the gifs I tried to made while making the storepage optimization, I think they resulted pretty cool! (sorry bit gif heavy)

Wow, the industry enviroment looks very apealing, will it also have animations? Smoke and stuff ?

Thanks! I was really planning to make fire and smokes. Also clouds into background etc! In current state the level is already playable and pretty fun and I will focus on more important things to do. But I really would like to add that eye candy later on.

[Sazem]

My A.I really needs some work still with the pathfinding, but currently I am so happy that they can adapt to the destroyable environment!


I still need to make tweaks and modifications for the different states. Currently biggest problem they have is with bridges. They understand normal tiles very good and their own limits, but sometimes they fall of from the 2-way platforms or cant really calculate the route using them.

[Sazem]

The game dev is so much fun when you dont have to google everything, just think and program in a flow!
Made one new level, new weapon, fixed bugs that I received feedback from and also made a juicy text to show damages and weapon pick ups!

[Sazem]

Pushed the latest patch to Steam.
Has the revolver and this snow level called "Snowy Hills".

https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/926400/view/2542794099109546418

I am going to start making the next "bigger" update, 0.5 Beta. I will make the pathfinding better, so the A.I can navigate on all levels. (especially the oil rig currently has challenges).

Also medkits and melee hits are very requested features that I am planning to do. I have some issues with my code database and every weapon have to have their unique ammotypes. So I couldnt make weapons use same ammos, example shotgun, autoshotgun, db shotgun etc.. one issue to fix too.

Also the split screen to support co-op... So I got a lot todo still. Also I spend 10bucks for FB marketing lol, lets see if has any effect (I doubt).

My first visibility week + discount week did double the sales! Scatteria sold whopping 75 units so far lol!

Im still happy of the A.I pathfinding. Without any pre expirience I got it to work. Far from perfect but its still so cool to see after making new level and just place the A.I there, it starts to navigate around it

[vdapps]

Looks cool! Cg to alpha release!

[Sazem]

Looks cool! Cg to alpha release!

Thank you!! 

I think now my most asked feature for the game is medkits. Maybe the game is too challenging for most of the people. (I only have 7 singleplayer levels, so that was kind of the point).

So I dedicated today just implement it. Took me about 1½ hours totally and now I got them for the next update too.


Adding this type of stuff in the game is super fun, also making new weapons etc.
But damn it there is couple big monsters lurking in my codebase which I have to get rid off before start making any new weapons.. And the changes to be made there might not be very small either, so I am a bit afraid to start that battle