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[bryku]

Man, these are unpredictable times. COVID-19 surely hit the world hard.

Due to the outbreak, Polish citizens are now asked to stay home. Schools, cinemas and many other businesses have been closed. My wife is working as a photographer and all her sessions have been canceled. Luckily for us, I am able to perform my day job fully remotely.

Still, life goes on. I am still working on Shardpunk mostly during the evenings, so not much has changed here. And because the children are at home all the time, we even have more opportunities to spend quality time together. It's a good thing that I bought that PS4 earlier this year!

The Digital Dragons event - which was the main reason I decided to publish the 2nd demo, despite the tactical layer not being finished - has been postponed to September. The deadline for submissions to the Indie Showcase Awards has been moved to somewhere around May/June. This gives me time to polish the game and/or add more features.

This whole situation reinforces the thing I was aware of when I decided to start creating "Shardpunk": you should never wait for a "good time" to start working on your project. Things around you will be changing all the time (be it for the worse of for the better) so the best thing you can do is just be persistent and carry on with your work.

And that's what I am trying to do.

So here's the latest update for Shardpunk:

I am getting very positive user feedback for the 2nd demo (by the way: if you haven't played it, go grab it now). It has reached 100 downloads after 15 days. 1st demo was being downloaded 380 times in total in the span of 4 months.

The suggestions and remarks posted by the players are truly unremarkable. It is really an awesome feeling that there are people out that like the game and were willing to spend their time to post their comments and/or gameplay suggestions. Stuff like this gets me going!

Also, a message to the people who have filled in the post-game survey: worry not, I will surely respond to each and every entry!

Oh, and I'm proud that Shardpunk has now an article on the pixelpost page!



Even though I know it's not a fair comparison, it does feel great to be featured next to Doom Eternal

Anyways, let's talk about plans: I have around 2 months (maybe a little more) before the new Indie Showcase Awards deadline. I can either submit the same demo there (with possibly some few minor fixes) or try to create a 3rd demo having more features. I will shoot for the latter and we'll see how it goes.

So, the next tech demo will be about introducing stress and shelter mechanics.

Stress is now a stat that the player needs to be aware of.


Yup, that pink stress bar is new.

If the stress goes high enough, the player receives a "stressed" trait. This gives a % to hit penalty. Also, if the stress remains high, there's a probability that a character will receive a negative quirk. To make this thing balanced, receiving a negative quirk is currently only allowed once a day.





Characters gain stress each time they receive damage, or if any of their allies die. Stress can be regained by using stimpaks and killing enemies. The exact amounts of stress lost/gained will have to be defined later after I will have the whole gameplay loop present.



With these stress basics in place, I am ready to start working on the shelter mechanics to finalize the gameplay loop. Hopefully, I'll be able to write more about this in the next devlog entry.

Take care! And enjoy the explosion gif!

[bryku]

I feel like it's time to discuss some post-demo feedback here. It's been a couple of weeks after the demo release, and as the shelter mechanics are not in a showable state yet let's focus on some of the remarks/ideas the players had.

Still, if you haven't played the latest demo yet you can grab it here.

Encumbrance

Every character has a max carry capacity, and when it is exceeded a character cannot move further.



Few people have noted that this could become annoying. The player needs to collect stuff. If someone carries too much, they need to a) drop the item, b) move the character to the side, c) move another character on top of the item and pick it up.

One of the ways to make it less of a chore is to make sure that a character that carries too much can still move. They might have their movement range reduced, or some other penalties applied instead.

This won't solve the issue with the need to juggle inventory items between characters though. One solution to this problem would be to introduce a shared inventory - so each time when you find a thing it gets added to a common pool.

This approach would mean that individual carry capacity would become obsolete. There could still be a max capacity, based on the number of alive characters. However, this generates new problems:

a) If a character dies, and the max capacity of the common inventory decreases, which items get removed from that common inventory?

b) As grenades and stimpaks are now also treated as inventory items it would be looking silly that each character has access to every utility item.

I believe I will stick to having separate inventories. Still, I will have to allow easier passing of items between characters. Maybe I will let characters to throw inventory items around in a small range - I'll see how it works.

Shotguns being too good at long distance

Yeah, shotguns are now basically behaving too similar to "regular" long-range weapons. I will experiment with drastically reducing their range and making sure they have an AOE effect instead. Killing rats - especially more than one at a time - is a big fun generator so I need to add more of it.

Soldier class being OP



Seems that the combat suit might be *slightly* too strong. The "boost" skill resets the weapon heat, and the boosted shots don't generate heat themselves. This resulted in almost no need to perform a weapon reload for the soldier.

I don't recall why I decided to make the boosted shots ignore weapon heat generation - I will change that.

"Revival" mechanics



When a character's HP fall to zero, they're dead. All of their inventory is dropped on the floor and that's it. However, it might be worth to give the player a last chance to save a character - probably by introducing a "bleeding out" state (similar to the one in XCOM or Mutant Year Zero) during which a character cannot perform any actions, but can be "revived" using a stimpak by another character.

I am definitely putting this one in my backlog - although it may not make it way to the nearest demo.

Cover visibility issues

Players can see the cover levels of each map tile. However, when a thicker wall is present, the bottom shield gets covered by the wall texture.


With a narrow wall, the player can see the bottom shield on the movement target.


Thicker wall: half of the movement target is hidden behind it.

Now, this does not seem like a big issue to fix (simply increase the amount of wall stuff that becomes opaque) - however, due to the way I am drawing walls and their top parts it will require a full rework of the wall display system. With the limited time I am able to put in game development this will be a long-lasting thing. Still, I will have to do it someday.



OK, I will stop here for now. I still have a long list of game-related things I need to think about and I will leave them for future blog entries.

As for the next demo progress update: I do have the basic shelter management code working, although the gameplay loop is not complete. I am mostly busy with making the two parts (combat and shelter part) working together in an enjoyable way.

Thanks for reading, and have a great Easter!

[bryku]

Damn, it's been two weeks since the last devlog already? Time does fly fast, especially when all your daily and weekly routines have been flipped upside down because of the pandemic.

Here's a list of stuff I changed/added recently to Shardpunk:

Shotgun AOE attack

I mentioned it in the previous blog entry; I wanted the shotguns to feel more juicy on the short range, therefore I've added an AOE attack for them. It covers three adjacent tiles next to the shooter. What is more, it requires the weapon hit to be at zero level, and uses all the heat in the shooting process.



Here's the thing though: I played the combat several times and didn't find myself using that new ability too often. That might be related to the fact that I've reduced the game difficulty a little (I've decreased the number of enemy pods). I'll have to ramp it up again.

Lesson learned: adding new, powerful player skills to the game is equivalent to decreasing the game's difficulty level (duh!).

Side note: it might be that the AOE range is simply too small. I might need to ramp it up.

Clearer % to hit visualization

As a bonus, while working on the shotgun AOE thing I expanded the %to hit calculation/visualization mechanism, so now the % to hit chances are being displayed directly above enemies:



This provides more clear information for the player; also, it helps me a lot with debugging.

Oh, the % to hit is also displayed when targetting friendlies (as shotgun's AOE attack can damage them as well):



Ranger's precision shot

Another skill is the "precision shot" for the ranger, that gives a 100% to hit chance but comes with a cooldown.



It's a nice thing to have access to an action that you can always count on.

More information displayed in the game's HUD

This was an experiment, and I liked the results: I made sure that all traits of currently selected character are always visible on the screen, without the need to open up character details screen.



Initially, I thought that the only way to show all the traits in the HUD is to introduce trait icons. However, I still believe that creating distinguishable icons might be a challenge; it might be worth coming back to the icons' idea after I have all the traits/skills/effects figured out.

Right now I am displaying trait names, and it looks good. I was afraid that it would cover too much of the combat screen, but in my opinion that's not the case.

What's next?

Short-term, I want the game to be ready for any upcoming showcase/competition. Digital Dragons submissions have been pushed to May (though I don't know whether this is the final date). Pixel Heaven Fest's deadline is at the end of August. I need to be prepared that I won't have time to flesh out both combat and shelter layers on time (and make them work together smoothly), which means I will have to be ready to rip out only the combat part again.

Long term, it is about fully integrating the shelter layer to the game. I am thinking of a demo that would allow the player to start the game in the combat mission, then move to the shelter phase, and then play a part of another combat mission. This should be enough to grab the interest of the players and receive feedback before I work on the game further.

That's it for now. Stay safe!

[Ramos]

I see you made some nice progress since last time I checked, good job!

[bryku]

I see you made some nice progress since last time I checked, good job!

Thanks! Yeah, I'm still working on the game in my spare time only, but I'm trying to be persistent

[bryku]

Howdy! I checked all the dates and it seems that Digital Dragons competition has its new deadline set to 1st of July. It means I have a few weeks to polish the game in its current state and release a new demo.

I will have to hide the shelter phase though, as it is still not ready.

Now, several weeks of development sound nice - but I have to remember that I am only able to work on this during evenings and/or early in the mornings. This does not give me a lot of time in the end.

Anyways, I decided to squeeze in one extra game combat feature which is about reducing the enemy turn duration. Sure, there is already a possibility to speed up enemy movement by holding the space button but I knew that more could be done to make the gameplay more convenient.

So: there is a lot of melee enemies in the game. And they run a lot, as they need to reach player characters in order to hit them, obviously. And sadly, melee enemies were not making moves in parallel.





There had to be a way to speed this up. I decided to use a similar approach to the one XCOM 2 had when dealing with Lost (zombie-like creatures, coming in large numbers): melee enemies will all move in the same time, and only when all the movement is finished, each of them who has a possibility performs a melee attack.

To make stuff more readable, I decided that such move-then-attack batches will be run consecutively for each set of melee enemies for each pod (spawn point). Enemies originating from a single pod tend to be closer together, so the player will see where they move.

So I made the change. I will skip all the performance improvement challenges I had to face (as pathfinding had to be calculated quicker). Anyway, after I made the change a number of other issues appeared:

Issue #1: The camera movement

If more than one enemy is moving at once, which one should be followed by the camera? I thought about not moving the camera at all, as that's what I do when an enemy pod gets triggered for the first time. The thing is that enemies in a triggered pod have 50% of their original action points (as the triggering phase is only there to make sure they get in position) so they were not traveling long distances, meaning that even after the move they would not go outside of camera's viewport. Here it was not the case.

I decided that the camera will focus on the first melee enemy in a pod, and it looked good.

Issue #2: overwatch reaction shots

So yeah, the camera was following the enemies nicely. But then, player characters could have overwatch enabled. And as multiple enemies were moving at once, more than one reaction fire could take place. This caused a few visual issues.

The first one was related with a visual "feature" that I've added the other day, about friendlies reacting to another friendly shot with a "dodge" animation:



One character shoots, others duck.

It turned out it wasn't looking good when multiple reaction shots were being taken: a character who was shooting was also performing that "dodge" thing.

In the end, I made sure that a "friendly dodge" animation cannot happen during the parallel movement phase.

To be fair, the same issue was occurring when using the shotgun's AOE attack (I've increased its range, by the way): a character would be stuck in the "dodge" animation instead of getting correctly killed by friendly fire.



A friendly character has died. Everyone else has gained 5 stress points because of that. Unfortunately, he's stuck in another animation.

Issue #3: camera behavior during overwatch

With the camera following a single melee enemy, the player was not always able to see who is doing a reaction shot. So I fixed that as well: for the duration of a reaction shot, the camera stopped following the first enemy and focused on both the enemy being targetted by reaction fire and the character performing the attack.

Sounds good? Well, not really! It might be that more than one player character was firing a reaction shot. The camera couldn't be in both places at once (and note that each character might stand in a completely different place on a map) so in some cases, the player was still unable to see who is shooting (and whether they hit the target or not).

As an ultimate solution, I made sure that reaction shots are not displayed in parallel - they are queued instead.

So, the script for the parallel melee enemies movement is as follows:

1. All melee enemies start their movement, the camera starts following the 1st enemy only. 2. All reaction shots get displayed one after another. For each reaction shot the camera focuses on the target and the attacker. 3. If there are any melee enemies alive, they perform their melee attacks.



In this example, no enemy has reached its destination. Just look at this 37% hit!

Also, a bonus: characters can have a "multi-overwatch" skill, that allows them to shoot more than one reaction shot during the enemy turn. Without the queuing approach for reaction shots, it looked silly:



After all the fixes, it finally looks good:



Here's how all of this works if there are no overwatch reaction shots:



Pretty faster than the original approach, isn't it?

Anyways, that's it for this entry! I have three more weeks before the Digital Dragons submission, so theoretically I could squeeze in one major change into the game. Right now I will focus on some playtesting though.

Thanks for reading, and see you in two weeks!

[Ramos]

I see you made some nice progress since last time I checked, good job!

Thanks! Yeah, I'm still working on the game in my spare time only, but I'm trying to be persistent

I understand, I am in a similar situation but I am trying to maintain a constant flow of work with 2 updates per week since 2017.

I just saw some youtube gameplay videos and teasers of your game.
 May I suggest adding a scanline layer for effect? It may give more personality to overall visual(or not I am not sure but you won't know unless you try it) and as a side note if you do add it, than add more alpha to the layer as you approach the center of the screen

[bryku]

I understand, I am in a similar situation but I am trying to maintain a constant flow of work with 2 updates per week since 2017.

I just saw some youtube gameplay videos and teasers of your game.
May I suggest adding a scanline layer for effect? It may give more personality to overall visual(or not I am not sure but you won't know unless you try it) and as a side note if you do add it, than add more alpha to the layer as you approach the center of the screen

2 updates per week! Awesome! Is it about releasing a game update, or more like finishing two major features weekly?

About that scanline effect, I need to try it out! I believe you're using it in Chromosome Evil, aren't you? Do you have any example shader or other reference I could use?

[Ramos]

I understand, I am in a similar situation but I am trying to maintain a constant flow of work with 2 updates per week since 2017, we hope to finish the game this year

I just saw some youtube gameplay videos and teasers of your game.
May I suggest adding a scanline layer for effect? It may give more personality to overall visual(or not I am not sure but you won't know unless you try it) and as a side note if you do add it, than add more alpha to the layer as you approach the center of the screen

2 updates per week! Awesome! Is it about releasing a game update, or more like finishing two major features weekly?

About that scanline effect, I need to try it out! I believe you're using it in Chromosome Evil, aren't you? Do you have any example shader or other reference I could use?

Until now each Wednesday I did art update and programmer implemented art and Saturday he implemented mechanics and I test& bit of marketing but now we finished that so now I just make maps in editor and he just makes fixes.

So about scanlines, I don't recommend shaders because they may not work on some computers and it can also cause problems in low frames per second on old machines(performance issues) but then again maybe you can deal with these problems better.
Yes, I used them on Chromosome Evil but they are very smooth, hardly noticeable but enough to create that nice arcade polish feel(at least that's how I see it)
How I did it and how I recommend:
1. draw them manually you can leave as much space as you want between the lines(3 or 5 pixels space between or how many you want, adjust them to your game),
- use a grey neutral color if you plan on making different color themes and not to ruin the overall themes( I did them like this in my game)
- or if all your game got a certain color scheme, for example now your game mostly got a nice rust vibe to it, then adjust it to that
2. select middle zone of the layer(I used a simple circle) and add more transparency (this is the screen center so when player cheks main action the lines must be almost invisible because you want the player to stay focus on that area) and then select another circle as you get close to the edge of the screen with medium alpha fade and then the last zone is the edges of the screen where you can place little transparency(i dunno the exact alpha I used for my game because coder made final adjustments to that layer)
3. place this layer on top of characters and environment and effect explosions and all that BUT place it under the interface, popups and rollovers layers, in this way it will also be more user friendly for players to understand what is the interface and what is combat environment and it will also make the interface and rollovers stand out more
4. make tests for different screen resolutions, also if you have a travel/main explore(i hope you do have) thing and full-screen interfaces for  upgrades, base, skilldex and so on I don't recommend on using them there, just keep them on the environment, at least that's how I did for maximum environment immersion
5. if you use the advice of this guy above, send him a coffee (me)


Hope it helps  

[bryku]

Until now each Wednesday I did art update and programmer implemented art and Saturday he implemented mechanics and I test& bit of marketing but now we finished that so now I just make maps in editor and he just makes fixes.

I see. Sounds you're pretty close to releasing it!

So about scanlines, I don't recommend shaders because they may not work on some computers and it can also cause problems in low frames per second on old machines(performance issues) but then again maybe you can deal with these problems better.
Yes, I used them on Chromosome Evil but they are very smooth, hardly noticeable but enough to create that nice arcade polish feel(at least that's how I see it)
How I did it and how I recommend:
1. draw them manually you can leave as much space as you want between the lines(3 or 5 pixels space between or how many you want, adjust them to your game),
- use a grey neutral color if you plan on making different color themes and not to ruin the overall themes( I did them like this in my game)
- or if all your game got a certain color scheme, for example now your game mostly got a nice rust vibe to it, then adjust it to that
2. select middle zone of the layer(I used a simple circle) and add more transparency (this is the screen center so when player cheks main action the lines must be almost invisible because you want the player to stay focus on that area) and then select another circle as you get close to the edge of the screen with medium alpha fade and then the last zone is the edges of the screen where you can place little transparency(i dunno the exact alpha I used for my game because coder made final adjustments to that layer)
3. place this layer on top of characters and environment and effect explosions and all that BUT place it under the interface, popups and rollovers layers, in this way it will also be more user friendly for players to understand what is the interface and what is combat environment and it will also make the interface and rollovers stand out more
4. make tests for different screen resolutions, also if you have a travel/main explore(i hope you do have) thing and full-screen interfaces for  upgrades, base, skilldex and so on I don't recommend on using them there, just keep them on the environment, at least that's how I did for maximum environment immersion
5. if you use the advice of this guy above, send him a coffee (me)


Hope it helps  

Ah, you have a point with leaving most of the interface outside of the scanlines effect! I'll give it a try in the future, either by using your approach or a shader.

[bryku]

Ugh, so apparently I am not very good at reading dates. Digital Dragons submission deadline is the 1st of July. I mean I did get it correctly in my previous post, but I've mistaken July with June, resulting in me thinking that I have one month less time available 0_o.

So, now that I realized I have some spare time left, I decided to tweak one additional thing in the combat phase: the top walls.

I did mention it in one of my previous posts. Some of the testers were complaining that they cannot see enough of the floor hidden behind the wall if the wall is 2 or more tiles thick:


Here all is good. The player is able to see the whole tile behind the wall.


Here, however, we see that half of the tile is still hidden behind the top wall.

Now, the problem was caused by the way I was approaching top walls rendering. I was rendering them using a set of predefined sprites for each possible combination:


I've added some rough lines to make it more obvious where a tile starts.

Then, based on the neighbors of the tile, I was rendering the correct one. This worked good, except for situations in which a thick wall would be present:



Solving this would require to add even more predefined top wall tiles (to include all the combinations for thick walls, inner corners, etc. etc.). So as a workaround, I started covering these unwanted edges with dark rectangles:



So this approach worked well - no excessive top wall borders were being shown. However this was causing the initial issue of thick top walls not being fully transparent; I simply could not make them transparent, as there were these helper rectangles along the way that would expose the parts they were hiding.


The striped rectangles could not be made transparent as they'd reveal the excessive borders they were supposed to hide.

So I finally decided to drop this approach and try another one. I made sure that the inner sprite and the borders are physically separated. The border is being rendered on top of the inner sprite:



This approach allowed me to reduce the number of border sprites. Technically only three types are necessary: vertical, horizontal, and "corner" ones.



This could be extended - to improve the visuals - with introducing "front" and "rear" horizontal edges, and maybe some more variants. But these three sprites are all that is required to make this work.

Anyways, with the new approach I am able to hide as much of the top walls as I want to!


Boom! A thick wall is transparent! I see this as an absolute win!

That's all for this entry. Take care!

[bryku]

In theory, the submission deadline for Digital Dragons Indie Showcase competition ends in less than a month. The problem is that their submission page is not working (I contacted them about it several times, with zero response). I suspect that they might move it again. And for the time being, I am done with the combat phase. I need to complete the gameplay loop.

That being said, the demo planned for the competition will still hold the combat part only. Or at least that's the plan. It might be that if they push the submission deadline even further, I will be able to put the shelter phase into that demo.

Speaking of combat: characters are now reacting verbally when getting critically hit:



Luckily, Kurt has finished his (outstanding, as usual) job on creating shelter assets so I was able to start tweaking the visuals of that phase.

So, here's something more about shelters.

The goal of the existing demo (download and play it, if you haven't already!) was to reach the entrance to a bunker. Reaching a bunker (or we can call it a shelter, as it won't always be a bunker) is the end goal of each combat mission. The team travels from shelter to shelter until they escape the city (or face some end-game challenge; I haven't focused on that part of the game yet).

In order to unlock the bunker mechanism, a team member has to be equipped with a Fusion Core. Only by having this item characters are able to transition to the shelter phase.



Side note: I need to make sure that players are able to advance even if they don't have access to a Fusion Core. I have some ideas on how to handle it, but I will save them for future blog posts.

When characters reach the shelter the player has the ability to craft some extra equipment, cure wounds, reduce stress and so on. Shelters act as safe places that allow you to select the next location/mission to move to.

Here's the work-in-progress screenshot of the shelter view:



Each character can be visualized in two different ways in the shelter. If they are not severely wounded (meaning they have more than 2 HPs left), they are sitting near the map and can perform shelter actions.



However, if a character is severely wounded, they are unable to do anything productive. They simply need to rest. Or, they might simply die off if not treated correctly. Again, I believe the wounds mechanism needs a separate blog entry.



Every character gets a number of shelter action points they can spend on different actions. The number of action points depends on their health and stress levels. The actions' list is placed at the bottom (so same as in the combat phase).

Right now I am trying to tweak the user experience when using the shelter. The player can use the mouse to select an item/character and a corresponding action gets selected.



After I'll be happy with the shelter actions execution view, I will start adding the visuals for the food distribution phase; it might be that I will write more about it in the next devlog entry.

See you in two weeks!

[Ashedragon]

It's got a lot of mechanical depth going on here and it has me fascinated thus far.  Looking forward to the final product!

[bryku]

It's got a lot of mechanical depth going on here and it has me fascinated thus far.  Looking forward to the final product!

Thanks for the good words! Yeah, the "final product" is still far away, but there's progress!

[bryku]

Ugh. So the Digital Dragons conference (along with the Indie Showcase event) has been canceled this year. Well, they're moving to an online format, but I don't know whether I'll have a possibility to showcase the game there.

Anyway, I'm just focusing on completing the next demo. And today I'm gonna give you a tour of the shelter phase, as it is already coming together quite nicely.

When characters reach the shelter, they are able to perform a limited number of actions before the day ends. Each action consumes a number of action points. Right now by default, a character can have up to 3 shelter action points to spend.



Similar to the combat phase, there is one "active" character at a time. Such character can target places/characters (or use the actions list from the bottom) to perform an action.

I've added more detailed mouse texts to make it more clear what kind of actions are available.



I am also considering adding subtle highlights to action buttons when an actionable element is highlighted.

Characters now have to be healed after combat. Similar to XCOM, using stimpaks in combat only temporarily replenishes health. After characters reach the shelter, their HP is automatically reduced to the lowest level it got during combat.

To heal a character in a shelter, med supplies are used.



It is especially important to heal a character who is severely wounded (as I mentioned in the previous blog post, this happens when their health is 2 or lower). Untreated severely wounded characters might not make it through the night.

Also, as taking care of one's stress level is an important thing, the player can decide to spend all remaining APs to find inner peace. Keeping the stress low is important, as a stressed character may acquire nasty quirks. And their aim is reduced when stressed, too.



If the team has spare supplies, they can craft some combat equipment (stimpaks, grenades):



After the player is done with performing actions, the team needs to be fed. Each character consumes one piece of food supplies.



Without food, characters become hungry, then starving. This affects their combat abilities; also, starving characters might die during the night.

When the night ends, the player needs to choose the next destination. I am leaving this part for another milestone though; right now the next mission will be automatically selected, and the player will move to the loadout screen.



Note that the characters won't be going back to the shelter again, as they're trying to escape the city. It means they should grab the supplies they want to tag along. This might evolve into a nice metagame, as combat utilities (stimpaks, grenades, and a fusion core - which is necessary to open up the next shelter) also take up inventory space.

When the team is good to go, another mission starts.

This concludes the overview of the shelter phase I was working on. It is still not fully playable - for example, it lacks proper handling for a failure state (which can happen if everyone dies during the night, which is game over). But as usual, I am slowly getting there!

Thanks for reading, and see you in 2 weeks!

[Ramos]

Nice progress bryku

May I ask a few questions?
- will you self-publish?
- what will the game price be?
- do you have a stable ETA for the release date?
- how many people did you raise on your wishlist(steam coming soon page) and in how much time?

[bryku]

Nice progress bryku

May I ask a few questions?
- will you self-publish?
- what will the game price be?
- do you have a stable ETA for the release date?
- how many people did you raise on your wishlist(steam coming soon page) and in how much time?

Thanks for the questions! Here goes:

Self-publishing or not

My main goal is to release the game that is fun to play. A stretch goal would be making sure that it earns me enough to fund the development of the next game.

I believe that publishers help a lot, and having one is definitely an option. It might be that I will be needing one (or at least a PR company) in order to jump to full-time development on my side. That being said, a self-made crowdfunding campaign might work as well.

I am not worrying about all of this for now. I need to create a demo where all the core features of the game are present (shelters, combat, map navigation, character leveling). If I manage to attract a publisher along the way that would help me out financially, that's great - but it's not my top priority right now.


What will the game price be?

At this point, it is too early to decide.


Do you have a stable ETA for the release date?

Nah. I want to release the next big demo before the end of 2020, that's for sure.


how many people did you raise on your wishlist(steam coming soon page) and in how much time?

At this point, I have a little above 1000 wishlists, and the game page is on Steam since November 2019. I don't know what to make of this information though.

What about you? Do you have any specific release plans for your game?

[Ramos]

Nice progress bryku

May I ask a few questions?
- will you self-publish?
- what will the game price be?
- do you have a stable ETA for the release date?
- how many people did you raise on your wishlist(steam coming soon page) and in how much time?

Thanks for the questions! Here goes:

Self-publishing or not

My main goal is to release the game that is fun to play. A stretch goal would be making sure that it earns me enough to fund the development of the next game.

I believe that publishers help a lot, and having one is definitely an option. It might be that I will be needing one (or at least a PR company) in order to jump to full-time development on my side. That being said, a self-made crowdfunding campaign might work as well.

I am not worrying about all of this for now. I need to create a demo where all the core features of the game are present (shelters, combat, map navigation, character leveling). If I manage to attract a publisher along the way that would help me out financially, that's great - but it's not my top priority right now.


What will the game price be?

At this point, it is too early to decide.


Do you have a stable ETA for the release date?

Nah. I want to release the next big demo before the end of 2020, that's for sure.


how many people did you raise on your wishlist(steam coming soon page) and in how much time?

At this point, I have a little above 1000 wishlists, and the game page is on Steam since November 2019. I don't know what to make of this information though.

What about you? Do you have any specific release plans for your game?

I truly thank you for the information you shared, it helps me a lot
I would like to add you on discord on some point for more direct information exchange

What about you? Do you have any specific release plans for your game?
I started coming soon page somewhere in 2019 and currently managed to gather 3000 (from my calculations around 15% are fans from my old games, 15% are coming from the marketing I did and 70% are coming straight through Steam) on wl and around 200 on discord, my problem was that I released some games before, some with an indie publisher and some via self-publish and I did not build a fan database I only started now.
As for release date was planned last year but you know dev plan is always x2 then what you hope for so now I will either do a full release in September or I must wait until March 2021
As for publishing, I hope to do self-publish again and after this game, I will go as a full-time game publisher ooooor I find a big publisher who can pay a solid upfront minimum guarantee trust fee, and then I will do one more game.

Basically most of my life decisions are based on my current project release.

BTW how are you?
I am asking because during this 3 year dev time I encounter many depressions and a bit of madness and I am curious if this was just me. Fun fact is that the art of creating always hold me not to go into dark mode


ah and the game price I have no idea, I am thinking between 5$ and 25$, do you have any suggestions?
for your currently(just my opinion) is that is around a solid 20$

[bryku]

As for release date was planned last year but you know dev plan is always x2 then what you hope for so now I will either do a full release in September or I must wait until March 2021

Yeah, I guess the estimates are always too optimistic I'm glad to hear that you're already that close to release though!

Basically most of my life decisions are based on my current project release.

Oh, I hear you! The big decision of moving to full-time indie and abandoning (or at least postponing) my current day job is still ahead of me

BTW how are you?
I am asking because during this 3 year dev time I encounter many depressions and a bit of madness and I am curious if this was just me. Fun fact is that the art of creating always hold me not to go into dark mode

It is tough, that's for sure. I mean this is an obvious long-term gratification thing, so we need to be persistent. And still, there is a chance that a game will not become popular at all, so it's a risky business.

ah and the game price I have no idea, I am thinking between 5$ and 25$, do you have any suggestions?
for your currently(just my opinion) is that is around a solid 20$

Yeah, I believe you have the best knowledge on how much content there is in your game. I'd say 10$ - 20$ is a fair range for indies.

[ternbasedcombat]

I LOVE The way this looks!

It seems dope!

Do you already have a composer?

I would love to write a tune for you!

TM