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[kevin andersson]

Plans for this week

I thought I'd just throw in a quick update on this grey Monday (the weather in Sweden wasn't the best)

Testing Testing Testing
Currently the team have played through the whole game and wrote down EVERYTHING that we would like to fix. I've even written down small things that probably no one is going to notice. I might be biased but I honestly enjoy playing it, just lean back in my couch and play the game. But what's next on my to-do list is updating one of our bosses, I've barely touched it since a year back when we had our second event in September. It's not as difficult as the other bosses, it's too easy at the moment.

Multiple Language Support
I've added support so you can change language, however we're most likely only going to do fan-translations. So currently we've got one guy working on Swedish and as far as I know we've got one from Spain (or Mexico) and Germany who's volunteered to translate the game! So the game is going to be released with at least English and Swedish and then we'll add more languages when they're done. Don't know if anyone would be interested in knowing how we've structured our spreadsheets, but we're referencing the dialogs from some kind of a Source file and then we can share the "Swedish" file with the swedish translator and they can only edit one column and then we link that translation back to the Swedish export file. We can also keep track of how many letters there're on each row, so we can see directly if it's going to fit the dialog area in-game because we don't want a word to switch row while it's not yet been fully typed... Well I kept on talking, but there's more to explain and show which I personally find interesting

New Color Palette
Below is a new palette for one of the areas, we used to have two different areas that had a little connection but for new players this wasn't clear (not necessary for them to know this) so we decided to make it more obvious that you entered a new area. It was still using the same type of structure in the layout but now with other colors.

[kevin andersson]

Well it's been a while

STEAM PAGE IS LIVE!
You can now put Alwa's Awakening on your wishlist! It's hard to believe that a game that started a over two years ago is now almost finished.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/549260/

STATUS ON GAME
It's been a while since I updated this thread, the reason is that all of our focus has been spent on the game. We've added our second batch of testers to steam and there are around 40 people who's been playing it on Steam now. Some testers have been amazing and played a lot to finally 100% the game. The best thing right now is that the latest testers don't find any major issues which is a relief for the moment.

Right now we're only fixing minor issues and fixes. Resolution issues and minor menu stuff, for every "Playthrough & Fix" session for me the game feels a lot better. I think I would feel comfortable with releasing the game in it's current state, but we've got a little while left of this month. We've not announced a date in January but I want to be sure that I don't break anything before the release.

TESTERS AND UPDATE PROCESS
I can't even imagine the state of the game if we didn't have the testers that we've got. With their help we've managed to improve the game in so many ways from the state that we thought "basically everything is in the game now". Not that we've added a bunch of new content that wasn't planned but getting fresh eyes on your game is very healthy for development.

Since a few months back we've had the game running on Steam which means that fixing bugs for testers are a lot smoother now. Instead of sending dropbox links and what not, we can now easily update it on Steam which the great majority of our testers usually got running on their computer daily.

(Using new screen capture software so the gif is playing a little too fast.. sorry)

[kevin andersson]

Today we announced the release date for Alwa's Awakening!

Steam store page - http://store.steampowered.com/app/549260

Launch Trailer -

[Grapple Bug]

Been watching this one on Twitter - looking great!

[kevin andersson]

Thank you, hope that you enjoy the game when it's released!

[1leggedseagull]

Congrats to all involved, the trailer looks and sounds fantastic! Well done!

[kevin andersson]

Game is ready for reviews

I'm somewhat surprised that we ever got to this state, thinking back on these 27 months that we've been making the game on our spare time. Not that I didn't believe in our skills to make a game but it's such a huge task to actually stay commited and finish a project. The game is not released yet but it's in a state which we're most likely not going to touch until after the release when we've fix some more things, this is just in a perfect scenario unless the game breaks at launch which I for some reason have a hard time believing since we've tested the game so many times on all three platforms and the game have been working for quite some time now. Let's just hope that the release is not filled with pain.

For me personally it's an achievement to at least not plan to make a day one patch, just let people play the game and (hopefully) have fun. My plan is to continue to spread the word about the game while I watch some streams, can't watch too long though because of my constant fear of them running in to bugs.. We'll see how it goes.


What about this DevBlog?

Seems like almost every post I make starts with "Well it's been a while.." and then I say that I've been focusing on the game (which I always have been), but now I think I can post a bit more frequent and probably talk about some technical stuff. Could aslo talk about whatever you guys want to read about, if you've got a topic then let me know!

I'm going to finish of with a sweet gif, don't forget to wishlist Alwa's Awakening and spread the word!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/549260/

[kevin andersson]

How we've handled QA

Before we got the game up on Steam I usually made one build a week (sometimes more if it was close to a deadline). This was because I was mostly working on new features and required some more time. We had a folder structure on Dropbox where I placed the new builds for the rest of the team to download from and test.

We didn't do QA on other testers outside of us four that often, sometimes when we had a build for a public event we would send it to our small group of testers and gather some feedback. Public events were amazing to watch hundreds of people play your game and see how they would interact with it.

Running the game on Steam
Back in October we got our company papers straight and we could get proper access to Steam. By then we were "done" with the game, all features were there and we've been polishing it for a good while. So now the builds were more frequent. My daily schedule would more or less be:

Morning: Look at last nights build report from rest of team and maybe fix some quick bugs
After work: Start fixing bugs from last build.
Around 10pm: Upload new build and then do something else to relax while rest of team would run through the build and report new issues.

Sometimes I would take a few hours of the weekend to play through the game myself and make my own "fixlist". This was rather fun when we were real close to feeling complete since I realized that the game was getting more polished and stable while we were slowly getting done with the game.

We had steam testers, we brought in more testers in two phases, around 20 testers each time. The first batch of testers really helped out with the most obvious ones and also the "progress bugs" which prevented you from reaching 100% and also finding repro-cases for save bugs. The other batch of testers came in quite late but since they did we had some testers that didn't find any bugs in their playthrough. This was an interesting phase where we could still find some softlock bugs and minor issues while some never found bugs.

Current state
As of now we've got less than a handful of minor details that shouldn't affect anyones playthrough at all, don't think that anyone will notice but I will get to these as soon as the game is out. Right now the game is review-ready (Monday the 16th) and this will most likely be the version that's going to be released on February 2.

[fireboy]

Congratulations ... I'm watching the release.

[kevin andersson]

Thank you! :D

[kevin andersson]

Alwa's Awakening is now out on Steam (PC/Mac/Linux). It's been two interesting years for us and now the day has finally come! We hope that you enjoy the game that we've been making and can't wait to hear what you think about it! If you're streaming or reviewing the game let us know so we can see it!

You can get the game for 9.99$ here - http://store.steampowered.com/app/549260/

With kind regards,
Elden Pixels