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[RobertGameDev]

That trailer was so beautiful, it almost made me tear up.

Thanks!

The game alpha is now up on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/666140/My_Time_At_Portia/

Without Greenlight now, I'd suggest anyone trying to eventually be on Steam setup a preview page and have people add the game to the Wishlist.

That is actually a very good point, how was the process of getting the game page up now that there is no greenlight?

[zede05]

It's been a few days since we released our alpha to the public, and so far there has been over 20,000 downloads, that's actually better than Planet Explorers' first alpha build numbers, so we're pretty happy about that.

We've been meeting several times over the last few days going over player feedback. What they liked, what they didn't like, what they want. Overall, players liked our direction for the gameplay. Many asked if we're going to add farming in the future.

By watching how other people play on Youtube, we realized that one of our worries really do exist, and that is at the start of the game, the player tend to go from the workshop to the commerce guild, then back to the workshop, then back to the guild again. But players didn't seem to care. Still, this is an issues that we're actively looking to remedy. The other issue we worried about was farming. We used to have farming when we first designed this game, we even have all the code for it pretty much done, but then we took it out because A. it was too hard to balance against the workshop production line and B. we didn't want the game to be too similar to Stardew Valley. But now that we know most players want farming, we have to take sales into account, which means we have to somehow fit farming into the game in some way.   

Anyway, we've been adding more characters to the game over the last week, here are some screens:

[thunderlight10]

It's been a few days since we released our alpha to the public, and so far there has been over 20,000 downloads, that's actually better than Planet Explorers' first alpha build numbers, so we're pretty happy about that.

We've been meeting several times over the last few days going over player feedback. What they liked, what they didn't like, what they want. Overall, players liked our direction for the gameplay. Many asked if we're going to add farming in the future.

By watching how other people play on Youtube, we realized that one of our worries really do exist, and that is at the start of the game, the player tend to go from the workshop to the commerce guild, then back to the workshop, then back to the guild again. But players didn't seem to care. Still, this is an issues that we're actively looking to remedy. The other issue we worried about was farming. We used to have farming when we first designed this game, we even have all the code for it pretty much done, but then we took it out because A. it was too hard to balance against the workshop production line and B. we didn't want the game to be too similar to Stardew Valley. But now that we know most players want farming, we have to take sales into account, which means we have to somehow fit farming into the game in some way.   

Anyway, we've been adding more characters to the game over the last week, here are some screens:

Thanks for putting Farming back in it! Will there be voices actors for the characters in this game? And you guys should make a My Time at Portia Facebook page or do you already have one?

[zede05]

Thanks for putting Farming back in it! Will there be voices actors for the characters in this game? And you guys should make a My Time at Portia Facebook page or do you already have one?

We're going to add voices, but it all comes down to cost. If we get professional voice actors, it'll be very nice but it will blow our budget apart, it's getting tight as it is. So we'll probably use free voice actors for now, some of them can be really good anyways.

All of our contacts are on our homepage: portia.pathea.net.

[justincavenagh]

Thanks for putting Farming back in it! Will there be voices actors for the characters in this game? And you guys should make a My Time at Portia Facebook page or do you already have one?

We're going to add voices, but it all comes down to cost. If we get professional voice actors, it'll be very nice but it will blow our budget apart, it's getting tight as it is. So we'll probably use free voice actors for now, some of them can be really good anyways.

All of our contacts are on our homepage: portia.pathea.net.

You're 100% right, Voice Acting is a expensive rabbit hole. If you use free voice actors make sure that you record them correctly. It is honestly better to not record the dialogue and just use text rather than have poorly performed/recorded dialogue.

[zede05]

You're 100% right, Voice Acting is a expensive rabbit hole. If you use free voice actors make sure that you record them correctly. It is honestly better to not record the dialogue and just use text rather than have poorly performed/recorded dialogue.

Well, the voice actors are all over the world, the best we can do is to cleanup and balance the sounds as best as we can in post. But yeah, you're right in that if it's bad, then better not to use it at all.

For anyone wondering, here's where we get the free voice actors, really nice people: http://voiceacting.boards.net/

[zede05]

Over the past year, we’ve been tweaking the gameplay constantly. Sometimes we added in too much story and it felt like being dragged around by the nose, then we let loose too much and the player became directionless. We also saw a conflict between workshop gameplay and farming gameplay. On one hand, players had to spend a fair amount of time and energy to attend to their crops every morning, on the other hand, we were encouraging players to go outside and explore new things by having a very rich map. The balance and the rhythm just wasn’t there, and it was causing the game to be not fun.We had a bunch of meetings this spring in which we decided to have a workshop over a farm, the main reason was by that time the world and backstory that we were setting up with the Abandoned and Hazardous Ruins and all the various areas was a better fit for a workshop, you just didn’t need all the area and all the resources if you’re just making a farm. We put farming on the back-burner and concentrated on the core of the game.

Which brings us back to now. We know we’ll need to bring back farming, there’s just way too much demand, but we need to figure out a better way to implement it in our game. We’re going to try something different with farming this time, unlike most of the farming games where you have to take care of your crops everyday, consuming lots of time and energy, we’ll try to make the farming more industrialized, more modern, such as using a planting box or a semi-automatic irrigation system. We want to keep the essential part of farming, such as planting your own crops and watching it grow, while taking out much of the daily routine associated with it.

We still need to balance the farming output in the economy system so that players don't start using farming as a way to "farm" for money. 

We also made a few more indoor scenes:

[thunderlight10]

Will you guys add a Arcade in this game and Casino maybe?

[thunderlight10]

Also if you guys put names on top of characters heads please add the option to turn it off or on!

[zede05]

Also if you guys put names on top of characters heads please add the option to turn it off or on!

Yeah, we'll probably add in that option. We actually are considering a relic arcade cabinet that the player can dig up.

[thunderlight10]

Also if you guys put names on top of characters heads please add the option to turn it off or on!

Yeah, we'll probably add in that option. We actually are considering a relic arcade cabinet that the player can dig up.

Cool! So no Casino? Or atleast a option to play poker or a slot machine area?

[zede05]

Cool! So no Casino? Or atleast a option to play poker or a slot machine area?

No idea if we'll do a casino, maybe if we sell really well in Early Access. We have in mind that a city near Portia is a very famous cultural city, maybe we can do a casino there.

I've been doing lots of writing the last couple of weeks, trying to advance the storyline. I have finish about 1/3 of the game story now, with everything else plotted out. Since this is a sandbox game, all the storylines are split into individual pieces that could fit anywhere on the timeline. Even with the overarching logic down, it's still really hard to write, since I have to keep track of not only the story, but also item progression and player progression speed. We do a bunch of playthroughs each week and I do a lot of rewrites afterwards.

We updated our lighting model to the newest Unity standard, and the results are very satisfactory, should have done this a long time ago. The bad part is that I'll need to retweak all the weather numbers again.  

[thunderlight10]

Cool! So no Casino? Or atleast a option to play poker or a slot machine area?

No idea if we'll do a casino, maybe if we sell really well in Early Access. We have in mind that a city near Portia is a very famous cultural city, maybe we can do a casino there.

I've been doing lots of writing the last couple of weeks, trying to advance the storyline. I have finish about 1/3 of the game story now, with everything else plotted out. Since this is a sandbox game, all the storylines are split into individual pieces that could fit anywhere on the timeline. Even with the overarching logic down, it's still really hard to write, since I have to keep track of not only the story, but also item progression and player progression speed. We do a bunch of playthroughs each week and I do a lot of rewrites afterwards.

We updated our lighting model to the newest Unity standard, and the results are very satisfactory, should have done this a long time ago. The bad part is that I'll need to retweak all the weather numbers again.  

Cool hopefully it sells well in Early Access!

[cynicalsandel]

If you don't mind me asking, how many people are on your team?

[vitorlanna]

About the farming, if you're going to include maybe a way to do it without harming the economy too much would be that instead of growing crops to sell you grow ingredients for crafting? Or tools or consumables?
I remember reading about a game (called "A Good Gardner") where you plant weapons such as spears and axes.

The game looks fantastic btw.

[zede05]

If you don't mind me asking, how many people are on your team?

A little over 20 devs for the game. We're trying to staff up to 30, but that'll cost more money, of which we don't have much of.

Anyway, I haven't been updating this enough, been trapped in the writing bubble for the storyline of this game. We're trying to get the script done before the game gets on EA so that we can have a better chance of not blowing up old saves, that really kills enthusiasm in a hurry, doesn't it? 

The game has been going through a ton of changes over the last month. We've finalized a lot of the content goals, which means we also finalized the milestones. We're aiming to be done with the game in August 2018, at the current pace, it'll be a very tight schedule. But what can you do, we only have so much money, and we need to get this done before it runs out.

Speaking of money, we're going to do a Kickstarter next week. Here's a preview link for it, check it out and tell me what you think? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1757963851/955732551?ref=b0lei8&token=15cbc87f I don't like Kickstarters, as it puts a lot of strain on the development process, but gotta do whatever to make sure the game gets out in the best form possible.

[Pixel Noise]

Wow this is stunning - the trailer looked amazing! Really hope you guys have a successful KS campaign, this looks like a wonderful project! 

[zede05]

Well, the Kickstarter is live now, fingers crossed for everything! 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1757963851/my-time-at-portia-an-enchanting-sandbox-simulation/

I worked on this for two weeks, man I forgot how taxing this can be.

[MartinDk7]

Well well... Hello there! Martin here, another of the members of the Portia team  .

We haven't updated for quite a while, so actually we got some news to share with you – Let's try!

1 – We were successful in our KS! Dang, it was an intense month! The feelings, emotions, were like in a roller coaster, we started pretty well with a good amount of backers, but then the thing went down then there were moments where we really started wondering if the we'd be successful but... at the end it just ramped up and we even exceeded the initial goal! 

2 – We got to partner with Team17! And that's pretty rad since they'll help us to publish and bring Portia to all the platforms other than Steam (PS4, Xbox One and Switch). Personally I'm really excited about the idea of playing it on the Switch 

3 – The 3.0 Alpha version was released – Not without some delays  – for the backers who pledged for the beta access. Overall the users are happy, however there are still things that got to be tweaked and balanced (weapon damages, prices, all that sort of thingies).

As for now, we are working in the 3.5 Alpha update, expected to be released within a couple weeks. This new version will include some new stuff, including a new area, new quests, some mini-games, and, of course, some bug-fixing.

And that's it for now! I'll try to bring more stuff soon... So stay tuned 

[Voltz.Supreme]

Visuals are top notch! Could be improved even more with some nicer lighting.