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[invicticide]

Legacy of the Elder Star is a shoot 'em up for the rest of us. You are the Cosmonaut, an eternal cosmic hero who must shatter the robotic Infinite Legion and rekindle a dying star!





The game is played exclusively with the mouse (no keyboard, no gamepad). That gives you 1:1 avatar motion which lets you move faster and with more precision than in any other shmup. I use that for some unique movement-based attacks like the game's most iconic move, the star dash, wherein you physically dash through entire chains of opponents to destroy them all in one quick gesture.

Level sequences are randomized, so you're not just memorizing one optimal path like you would with classic shmups. I've made a big library of hand-built enemy patterns; each of the five stages has an authored high-level structure, and the phases within that structure randomly select from themed subsets of those patterns.

I've done all the design, code, music, and writing, and I've hired a local artist to do the art and animation.

I'm bad at dev logs but I'm trying to get better.

Post index

• September 26, 2015 – First week on Kickstarter
• December 4, 2015 – Failed Kickstarter + many updates
• January 26, 2016 – Updates for MAGFest
• February 16, 2016 – Story and gameplay trailers
• February 25, 2016 – MAGFest postmortem
• June 7, 2016 – Steam launch

[invicticide]

So it turns out I'm a bit shit at keeping a devlog.

Well here's an update, anyway. We've made a huge amount of progress since the last time I posted here a billion years ago:





We launched a new demo a couple days ago, for PC, Mac, and Linux. You should play it. It's fun! I'm not biased at all!

We've been doing the Kickstarter and Greenlight thing for just over a week now, but I kinda screwed up at the start, so it's not doing too well right now.

This is far from my first game, but it is my first game I've had to do my own marketing for, and it's been... an experience. I've learned all kinds of fascinating stuff – like how to use Buffer to make my life a million times easier, for instance, or how to use Facebook ads to A/B test different messaging approaches – but it's also been kind of depressing to spend so much time selling. I constantly feel like I'm just spamming everyone to death and making them hate me, even though I've actually been getting much more support than anything.

I suppose I'll get used to it, eventually. I hope.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what to do if our Kickstarter fails (which it very well may). That hasn't put me in a great mood. I'm pretty put off by the whole mobile scene, even though I know I could make good money at a mobile studio (I'm an 11-year industry vet and a Unity expert). AAA is still crunch-town; I gave up my 20s for that, and I don't look forward to giving up my 30s for it too. Indie feels like such a lottery these days; I'm doing it full-time right now but if our Kickstarter fails then that arrangement will probably have to end right quick. And I have no idea what I would even do outside of games.

I guess everyone wrestles with this stuff while crowdfunding, though... right?

[invicticide]

Well, our Kickstarter failed... but you probably saw that coming.

Our analytics showed an above-average conversion rate but low overall traffic, leading me to the conclusion that our problem isn't quality, but reach... but you probably saw that coming, too.

We were faced with a choice: return to Kickstarter in a month or two with better preparation (i.e. don't repeat this mistake), scrap most of the features we were trying to raise money for and reduce our scope to fit the much smaller budget we already had on-hand, or greatly delay the game's release in favor of taking on contract work for a while to replenish our bank account.

We went with option 2, and today I'd estimate we're about 60-70 days out from release. The game is actually shaping up nicely and I'm more proud of it than I thought I'd be after cutting the scope down by so much.

I've posted two big dev updates (1, 2) on our official site since our Kickstarter tanked but because I'm a terrible human being I keep forgetting to post things over here too. I am marketing god, hear me whimper.

Anyway, here's some stuff we've done since my last update here...

We updated our preview trailer, which is still not amazing yet but I'm way happier with this version than the one we opened our Kickstarter with.





We made a new battleship boss and a new hand-painted, fully-animated beam cannon effect:



We made a new environment for our second stage:



We made a new carrier boss which, curiously for a shmup, doesn't even have guns; instead it deploys randomized enemy squads at you, and sometimes throws in a brutal ramming attack for good measure:



We also wrote a few new pieces of music, built a sexy intro cutscene, added muzzle flashes to the player and most enemies, improved a ton of animations, made a ton of quality-of-life improvements, and applied to show at (and passed the first round of judging for) MAGFest in February.

Right now I'm researching whether or not it makes sense to partner with a publisher, and if so, who. I started a reddit thread about it which has already gotten some good replies. I'd love to hear from any of you about it, and some of you might find the discussion over on reddit interesting too.

[invicticide]

Legacy of the Elder Star has officially been accepted to the MAGFest Indie Videogame Showcase (MIVS) at MAGFest 2016!

We'll have the complete story mode available to play from start to finish. In fact, we're expecting to achieve our first complete internal playthrough later this week, which gives us plenty of time to test, balance, and polish!

Now to start working up our booth design...

[DragonDePlatino]

By the looks of the trailer the gameplay of this looks butter-smooth. A very nice fusion of both bullet hell and traditional shoot em' up elements. Good luck at MAGFest!

[nathy after dark]

Hi, Josh! Didn't know you had a TIGSource log but I'm happy I discovered it.

I read both the logs you linked to from your official site. Super hyped about the progress! I can honestly say I'm excited for your game every time I read about it, so your new marketing skills can't be so terrible.

I'm about to watch the Rami Ismail talk. I always love what he has to say.

[invicticide]

the gameplay of this looks butter-smooth.

Thanks. <3 I'm kind of obsessed with game feel and I have really high standards about it.

Didn't know you had a TIGSource log... your new marketing skills can't be so terrible.

They're terrible enough that you didn't know I had a TIGS log.

One of these days I'll get in some kind of groove of actually posting things consistently.

...maybe.

...probably not.

[invicticide]

We added a couple rad new gameplay elements to flesh out the fourth stage. Spinners change your relationship with screen space, forcing you to move your engagements in an arc ahead of the beam:



And our new stage boss, unofficially known as Robot Space Hydra (^_^) literally throws crap at you with its space hydra arms. (It also has another surprise in store that we won't spoil here!)



We've built the environment and first-pass gameplay for our fifth-and-final stage:



This stage takes place amidst the Infinite Legion's fleet, and through Clever Videogame Trickery™ we've created the sense of immersion in a vast fleet stretching far into the distance. I took a relatively "calm" screenshot here to better show off the background, but rest assured this level plays as intensely as you'd expect a shmup's final stage to play!

We've made some design quality-of-life improvements, too. We added detentes to bosses' health bars indicating the thresholds at which they'll break into their next damaged state. Crossing these thresholds causes a burst that captures all onscreen enemy bullets, which – if timed correctly – grants both a tactical scoring opportunity and a chance for a clutch escape from an overwhelming pattern:



And by long-standing popular demand, we added a health extend feature. Now you'll get back one lost hit point at every 20M-point interval. (Right now a very good 1cc run is averaging about 50M.) We also changed HUD messages to a more bold, graphic style, as seen here for the first time:



Coming soon...

We're working on a new, extended trailer for MAGFest which we hope to be able to share very soon. This will be our first trailer to properly address the game's story (plus plenty of gameplay, of course!)

We're about 95% of the way to both feature- and content-complete right now, and we'll be moving into postproduction imminently. We expect our MAGFest build to be a solid beta, and we're very close to being ready to announce a hard launch date. Stay tuned!

[invicticide]

It's official: we're launching on Steam in April! Windows, Mac, and Linux. Here's our store page if you want to follow/wishlist the game.

We also published a couple new trailers recently:

Story trailer:




Gameplay teaser:




I hear that press sometimes trawls these forums. If that's you, you might be interested in requesting preview keys or grabbing our presskit.

There's still some dev left to do on the game (obviously) but I'm starting to shift into much more of a marketing focus and, y'know, it's terrifying because I have no idea what I'm doing.

Yeah.

[invicticide]

We showed at MAGFest last weekend, and it was insane.

Legacy of the Elder Star was accepted into one of six 24-hour slots in the indie hall, which means I needed to have the booth up and running for 74 hours straight, from noon Thursday to 2pm Sunday. I say "I" because we couldn't afford to fly Erik (my artist) out with me, so I had to transport, set up, man, and tear down the booth on my own.

I just posted a massive article about how I did it. It includes loads of details, photos, links to all the specific equipment and supplies I bought, analytics reports, and a full cost breakdown.

Most conventions don't run 24 hours a day, but the stuff I had to do to make it work for this one – booth security and special build features – will actually yield great benefits for all our future shows, because if nothing else it lets you walk away from the booth for a few minutes without worrying that all your stuff will disappear or your build will go up in flames.

Hopefully it might benefit some of y'all as well.

[invicticide]

Legacy of the Elder Star launched today on Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux!

It's been a long road, through PR challenges and a failed Kickstarter to a strong MAGFest showing and a successful beta program. It's taken a lot to get here, and we're incredibly proud and excited to finally get to share our game with the world.

Here's our launch trailer, which I'm suuuuper stoked about:

[joemusashi]

Seeing this game it looks more like a mobile/tablet game that a PC/console one. Have you planned to release the game on tablet?

[invicticide]

Seeing this game it looks more like a mobile/tablet game that a PC/console one. Have you planned to release the game on tablet?

Only if we get enough interest on PC (and consoles later this year) to justify it. I can't make a real case to go to mobile without a pretty solid pitch to Apple/Google to get a featured slot; otherwise we just get absolutely buried.

What makes this feel like a mobile game to you? We worked really hard to specifically avoid that comparison.

[nathy after dark]

Excellent work on the game. It feels great to play, it's challenging, and I feel pushed to reach a higher score more than in most games, where score feels so much less meaningful. The soundtrack is especially impressive, given that you composed it in addition to doing all the design/programming! I enjoy how the songs often return to the same central melody, like BIT.TRIP Runner does.

As a beta tester, there are a few design decisions you made that I'd love to hear explained in detail. For instance, how enemy lasers used to damage the player even while invulnerable from bullets, and now no longer do that. This must have been a very hard decision to make, given how drastically it could have altered gameplay--removing an entire layer of complexity from the obstacles the player has to keep in mind. Also, I know the scoreboard and scoring system underwent a lot of evolution to make players find score competition satisfying and such. I'd definitely read a post about the design philosophies you used for that. And of course, as a programmer aspiring to also write music, I'd love some insight into your composition process!

These are just thoughts for what me and hopefully others on the forum might like to learn about the process. I'm very much looking forward to the post-mortem.

Back to the game, now.

[invicticide]

Legacy of the Elder Star is this month's Videogame Lookclub pick! Which is pretty awesome, since visibility of the game has otherwise been, uh... not good. So it's nice to see some people playing it and discussing it and discovering some of the little details we've tucked away in there.

Here's the club's official video introducing this month's pick:





Here's a fun Let's Play from club member @Jupiter_Hadley:





She also mentioned the game on the What's Indie News podcast this morning, which I just found out about and haven't watched yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1ZQP05bZ0

And here's a Twitter thread by club member @BantamSam13 which goes into a bunch of the accessibility options we added. I was really stoked to see this part of the game receive some recognition:

https://twitter.com/BantamSam13/status/907436723780677634

This little burst of attention even drove some actual sales on itch.io, which is super rad! (And frankly a bit unexpected, since after over a year of just total, complete, abysmal commercial failure, I'd all but written off the game as a thing that could ever make any money at all. I went back to a day job and everything.)

I didn't know the club existed before this, but now I'll definitely be following along. There are nice discussions in their Discord about the monthly game which remind me of how talking about games used to feel back before, you know, the last few years of General Internet BullshitTM ruined everything. It's nice and good and everyone should support them. <3

[nathy after dark]

This is extremely well-deserved! Awesome work on the game. I should maybe stream some of it before the month is over?